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Three day weekends go by so quickly. Last time I sat down here it was Saturday evening, after which I trotted off to the Rusing S&N with Trevor, Jon, Paul and a couple of Trevor’s friends. It was late licence night and very loud music, which conspired to have my ears ringing by the time I finally made it to bed at three Sunday morning.

Of course, that meant I slept away half the morning and was up around about the time it would have been more sensible to think about brunch rather than separate breakfast and lunch. Settled on bagels in the end, though, and sat down with the iBook for some more noveling. Got to within 800 words of this month’s 70,000 word target and, finding myself at the end of a chapter, was too zapped to do any more, so switched off and saved what was left of it for this morning.

I knocked them off in an hour or so before heading it out to the gym, and then around to mum’s for lunch, but it does leave me with an interesting dilemma. Do I set myself a target of just 10,000 new words by the end of the month, which would put me way ahead of schedule and should be easily achievable, or do I push myself for another 20,000 to take it to 90,000? I know I should aim for the harder one. The more work I do, the closer I am to the second draft, after all. But would it be better to slow the pace and spend some time thinking about things?

Hmmm…

Anyway, I didn’t get any more of it done today. After lunch with mum I mooched down to Woodham to see Mark and Mark for a Eurovision preview taped off Turkish TV. Ja spent most of his time hiding upstairs to get away from it all, but we did the whole voting ritual, and going on our unscientific straw poll results France should do well, with Bosnia, Croatia and Iceland coming in the top five.

Ireland’s entry is abysmal. It’s dreary, formulaic and boring. It goes absoutely nowhere. Belgium seems to have entered the backing track to an advert for a bank, and Austria is clearly going through a period of national insanity.

Has that guy singing for Sweden got a false right arm?

The German entry was fun, but I think that was in most part because of the cartoon-style video so it might not do so well on the night, while the Polish one was a rock-documentary about protests on the streets, and the police fighting back with water canon.

Oh, and don’t get me started on Estonia. What a load of rubbish. Something about it being like we’re back in the Eighties. I’m not sure whether they were referring to the singer’s minging outfit or the final decade of communist rule, but it was so convoluted I awarded it Norway’s traditional ‘nul points’.

Coincidentally, Norway’s entry is pretty good this year, in spite of the fact the singer has apparently had death threats for his looks.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 5th, 2003 at 11:40 pm and is filed under Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.