As you can see from the photos and the title, I’ve gone all Monty Python & The Quest For The Holy Grail over this post. If you haven’t seen it, I still think that it holds up in this day and age for classy yet hilarious humour. It is the most quotable movie I know and I love so many of the scenes from it. In fact, it was hard to choose some scenes to fit into a writing theme as so many worked well!

I’m half delirious from forcing myself to stay awake due to the four hours of sleep I got last night to get past that fabled forty thousand mark. The other half is slowly going insane, as I mentally prepare for the three hour drive ahead of me tomorrow after work so I can spend a full day in training sessions to then drive three hours back…

Okay, phew. That was one hell of an intense day of writing. I’m actually going to stop myself instead of pushing on despite the fact that I could easily keep going. I think if I give myself the remainder of the evening to think on it and sleep on it as well, it’ll be better for tomorrow! Not only that but when I look at the walls of my room, I am pretty sure all I see is the Matrix. An early night never hurt anyone.

As you can see up there my count has hit that crazy sixty percent complete madness, although I think there is still so much more to this novel that I’ll keep writing as much as I can and I wouldn’t be surprised if I hit seventy thousand before NaNoWriMo ends (or my sanity gives in, one or the other). My daily word target is now…

1. George Orwell’s classic novel Nineteen Eighty-Four was published on this day, 8 June, in 1949. But this wasn’t the original title of the novel. According to the introduction to the Penguin Classics edition, Orwell initially planned to set the novel in 1980; this then became 1982, and finally 1984 (or Nineteen Eighty-Four, as the title is usually rendered).

2. Orwell named Room 101 after a conference room in BBC Broadcasting House. In this room, during the Second World War, he had to sit through tedious meetings when he worked for the Ministry of Information. Indeed, the Ministry also served as the inspiration for the Ministry of Truth, where the novel’s protagonist, Winston Smith, works. ‘Room 101’ has, of course, entered wider linguistic use as a term for something containing one’s pet hates or worst fears. Although the novel also popularised the terms ‘thoughtcrime’ and ‘thought police’, these…