Last night I got to 14,526 words in my NaNoWriMo novel.

I watched a movie on TV last night called Changeling, directed by Clint Eastwood. The film, which is based on a true story, is set in Los Angeles in 1928, and tells the story of single mother Christine Collins (played by Angelina Jolie) whose nine year old son goes missing. Five months later the police announce that they have found the child, but Christine insists that the boy they have found is not her son. Continuing her search for the truth, Christine comes into conflict with the notoriously violent and corrupt 1920s LAPD. It was a really good film and very well made.

Later on I watched a horror movie from 1981 called The Entity, directed by Sidney J. Furie. The movie is based on a supposedly true story from 1976, and tells the story of a Los Angeles woman (played by Barbara Hershey) who repeatedly comes under violent attack from an invisible force. Her psychiatrist believes the attacks are all in her mind, but a group of parapsychologists are determined to prove that the attacks are caused by an evil spirit. It was very slow-moving in places, but pretty atmospheric.

I went along to my parent’s house today for lunch. It was a fairly quiet afternoon.

Tomorrow I’m going to get my wisodm tooth removed. Apparently, because of the angle it’s coming in at, they are going to be cutting open my gum, drilling a hole into my jawbone and kind of levering the tooth out. Then stitching it back up again. needless to say, I am not looking forward to it. I’ll have to take a lot of painkillers apparently and probably won’t be on-line tomorrow.

Yesterday I got to 12,418 words in my NaNoWriMo story. At least the word count is increasing (it has to be a minimum of 50,000 words by the end of November).

I watched the first three episodes of the first season of The Wire on DVD. It works really well on DVD. The Wire is one of those shows that you really need to see every episode in sequence and also pay a lot of attention because it’s a very complex and intricate plot line. One of the good things with having the shows on DVD is that you’re not really at the mercy of the TV schedulers.

Today I went along to the supermarket to get my groceries for the week.

It was another really busy night last night. I got up to 10,312 words with my NaNoWriMo novel, and I was so tired when I was finished that I almost immediately fell asleep on the sofa. I spent three hours working on it and I was so frustrated by the end that I really did feel like packing the whole thing in. I won’t though. I’ll keep on with it and win the challenge.

I was only in work for a half day today, which was really good. I stopped off and got the complete DVD box-set of The Wire TV series, so that should be really good.

Last night I was busy again with my NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) story. I’ve got up to 8,206 words now. It was kind of difficult last night and took a few hours to do.

I watched the latest episode of True Blood, which I thought was really good, and it was another really dull day at work today.

I’ve been so busy with the writing recently I’ve not actually had chance for much else this week.

Last night I was pretty busy. I got to 6,126 words with the NaNoWriMo story. It was kind of easier than it was last night because I had a pretty good idea what I was going to be writing about (basically this new vampire is forced to prove his worth to his vampire community by undergoing this kind of trial thing in which he is forced to undergo various surreal hallucinations and confront various powerful creatures).

Work was really quiet and dull, as it usually is. It’s another episode of True Blood this evening. I’ll probably be sick to death of vampires by the end of November!

Last night was pretty quiet. I managed to get up to 4,054 words on my NaNoWriMo novel, so that was pretty good. I am really hoping that the finished work turns out to be good. The thing is that I’m really pretty bad at writing, and I’m pretty much completely untalented.

It was another really quiet and kind of dull day at work again. I was reading some of the book Interview With the Vampire by Anne Rice on my break at work. I have read it before but not for about fourteen years. Because my NaNo story has to do with vampires I’ve been trying to do some research. I’ve had a look at Dracula again, and I should probably check out the Twilight books at some point.

Last night I was playing some of Batman: Arkham Asylum on the PlayStation 3. It’s a really fun game. The background is that Batman has captured The Joker and has brought him to Arkham Asylum, but it turns out that it’s all a trap and that Arkham Asylum has been taken over by The Joker and his henchmen, and the staff, including Comissioner Gordon, have been taken hostage. Basically you play Batman and you have to explore the corridors of Arkham, fighting with The Joker’s henchmen and all the other familiar Batman enemies, including The Riddler who has left a number of puzzles scattered around that you have to solve. It’s a very involving game, and a lot of fun.

Later on I was watching the 1982 movie Halloween III: Season of the Witch, directed by Tommy Lee Wallace. It’s a very unusual sequel because, unlike every other movie in the Halloween franchise, this one does not focus on the indestructible psychopath Michael Myers. Instead it concerns the insane owner of a toy company called Silver Shamrock, who maufactures a range of popular children’s Halloween masks which are advertised endlessly with an irritating countdown jingle (“Three more days to Halloween… Halloween… Halloween… Three more days to Halloween… Silver Shamrock”). However, it turns out that the masks are lethal booby traps which are due to be activated by a special signal transmitted on Halloween night. Apparently, the producers John Carpenter and Debra Hill, wanted to turn the Halloween franchise into a kind of anthology film series with a new seperate horror film released every year focussing on a different aspect of the Halloween season. However the idea was abandoned due to the total commercial failure of this movie. The original script was written by acclaimed writer Nigel Kneale, who created the Quatermass TV series, but he had his name taken off the film when his script was changed in order to make it more gruesome and violent.

I started writing my NaNoWriMo story yesterday. I got 2,026 words done yesterday. The target is to write a 50,000 word novel by the end of November.

Today was yet another dull and quiet day in the office.

Last night I was listening to an episode of the Doctor Who radio series called “Sisters of the Flame”. In this episode The Doctor (played by Paul McGann) and his companion Lucie (Sheridan Smith), avoiding an urgent summons from the Doctor’s people, the Time Lords, find themselves on a space freighter where The Doctor is immediately kidnapped by aliens and Lucie is arrested by the ship’s security as a stowaway. However the Doctor soon discovers that suomeone is illegally using Time Lord technology and encounters an old enemy. It was pretty good. After that I listened to the first of a new radio series of The Man in Black, in which each week the sinister “Man in Black” (played by Mark Gatiss) introduces a one-off horror story. In this week’s story, “Phish Food”, a retired man gets his first computer and sets out to explore the internet, only to be plagued by on-line scams which he soon discover want much more from him than just his money.

I watched the 2008 movie Choke, directed by Clark Gregg and based on the novel by Chuck Palahniuk, on DVD. The film tells the story of Victor Mancini (played by Sam Rockwell), a sex addict who works as an actor in a historical recreation park themed around Colonial America, and operates a complex scam based around choking in restaurants on the theory that the people who save him will for ever afterwards feel responsible for him and send him money. He also visit his delusional, dying mother (Anjelica Huston) in a nursing home, and discovers a surprising secret about his origins. It is a pretty funny movie but it is neither as dark nor as funny as the book.

Later I was watching the original version of Halloween, directed by John Carpenter, in which a group of babysitters are stalked by masked psychopath Michael Myers, who has escaped from the institution where he has been confined since killing his sister when he was six. It is still a really powerful and often pretty scary film. It has inspired countless sequels, remakes and imitations and pretty much set the template for the whole slasher movie genre.

Today is really, really cold and very wet and so dark that when I woke up this morning I had a moment where I honestly felt that it was night and that I had slept through the day. I’m going to be making a start on my NaNoWriMo story today.

Late last night I was watching the 1931 film of Dracula, directed by Tod Browning. In the movie, a young solicitor named Renfield (Dwight Frye) travels to the remote Castle Dracula in the Carpathian Mountains of Transylvania, where the mysterious Count Dracula (Bela Lugosi) is planning to move to England. The movie does not stick closely at all to the original Bram Stoker novel, and it hasn’t aged very well by modern standards, but it is still a classic. Hungarian actor Bela Lugosi ended up forever typecast as Dracula and his performance has been imitated and parodied countless times since, but the perfrmance is still a really powerful one.

Today I went along and did some shopping. I got the film Choke, based on the Chuck Palahniuk book, on DVD, and a video game called Batman: Arkham Asylum for the PlayStation 3. I’m going to chill out and relax this evening until NaNoWriMo starts tomorrow.

Happy Halloween!

Last night I watched a movie on the Pay-Per-View TV On Demand service called Trick ‘r Treat, directed by Michael Dougherty. It was a 2007 horror movie set during Halloween night in a small American town. The film basically consists of four interlinking stories: A boy discovers that the high-school principal (Dylan Baker) hides a murderous secret, some teenage pranksters discover the truth behind a ghostly local urban legend, a young woman (Anna Paquin) is threatened by a mysterious stranger on the way to a party and an elderly curmudgeon (Brian Cox) is attacked in his home by a malevolent trick or treater. It’s all very cleverly linked together and the movie is hugely entertaining, which makes it a mystery why it was released straight to DVD, because it really did deserve better.

Today was another dull day at work, although I did manage to spend most of the day listening to Neil Gaiman stories on my iPod. I managed to get out fairly early as well. On my way home I stopped off and bought some wine and a pumpkin. When I got home I carved the pumpkin to make a jack-o’-lantern. At the moment I have a candle burning in an empty bottle of wine. I kind of think it looks good when you get the wax melted around the bottle, like you see sometime on the tables of bars and restaurants.