:D

Another day, another blog! How exciting!

I've been writing most of today and I've made some good progress with the re-write of 54321. I'm now up to around 9000 words, and I'm slightly lower in terms of novel progression than the previous draft (by 100 words or so). That's a bit worrying, because I need this draft to be a lot longer than the original draft. I finished version 1 at around 60,000 words, which was far too short for an Adult novel. It seemed like an enormous task to fill it out so much back then, so I just gave up on it.

Now I have some ideas for new things to add, and I'm reworking quite a lot of the plot in general. The first couple of chapters are *mostly* parallel (other than improving the writing itself), but we'll be getting some new things very soon, which is quite exciting.

Anyway, I've noticed that whenever I want a 'local' accent I end up writing something Yorkshirey (home region, don't you know), which was hardly appropriate for a novel set in London. Had to do a bit of research into a Cockney accent and then thought, wouldn't it be brilliant if there were a website that would actually translate Standard English into a dialect? And sure enough, there was:

http://www.rinkworks.com/dialect/

It's pretty neat. You type in what you want to express then it gives you a 'translation'...which is pretty much literal although it adds things here and there. It lets you change things into Redneck, Jive, Cockney, Elmer Fudd, Swedish Chef, Moron, Pig Latin, or Hacker. (I admit that I don't really know what some of those are!) Far too much fun. :D

"I'll vreete-a egeeen suun (meybe-a)!"
[which one is that? :P]

Let's link it all together...

I checked out my Google ads revenues on a whim today and found I'm close to getting paid, hurrah! It occurred to me to check my Google Analytics account, too, which is a useful tool for anyone who has a website. It lets you know how many people are coming to your site, how long they spend there, how many pages they visited, and many other interesting things. (www.google.com/analytics)

I saw that my A-Level revision website is doing very well at the moment, over a hundred hits a day! I imagine that will only increase as we get closer to exam term. I'm actually proud enough of that website to share it: www.allinfo.plus.com/levelup. I'll never get around to actually finishing it, but it's a lot closer to being finished than my other websites. Oh okay, you pulled my leg into doing a bit of shameless self-promotion: www.allinfo.plus.com/pokemonultimate and www.allinfo.plus.com/revision-gcse are my other two websites. Hehe. Please not that I was VERY young when I made the Pokemon one!

Anyway, it occurred to me that I might actually get some people reading my blog if I put the link on those pages, and I've now placed it on the Level Up homepage.

So yes, I now have even more reason to try to blog more regularly! (I wouldn't get your hopes up/get worried TOO much, though...) I'm back from university for the holidays now, so in theory I might have a bit more time on my hands. That's what I keep telling myself, anyway...

Feel free to comment if you've found this blog from my website! I'd love to hear from you. :) Now I should get going and write a novel...or something. Good old procrastination, now I'm less busy, I can welcome you back!