5033 words today on NanoWriMo. Trouble is, I think it’s left me somewhat the worse for wear. I woke up this morning feeling somewhat tired, and I’m now even worse. Things are getting on top of me, I’m feeling lonely and easily upset, and even the couple of bits of good news that happenned today didn’t really cheer me up. It’s a tiredness thing – I simply haven’t yet caught up with the fatigue from last week, so I’m going to take tomorrow as an official day off and do as little as possible. I was hoping to do a couple of big posts tonight, but they’ll have to wait. I have to believe that things are going to get better – it’s just a little difficult keeping that going in my mind right now. Things will improve. Just not right now…

It’s official. I’m done with London.

Nine days away, and the lack of updates have probably told you a certain amount about how well I’ve been doing. The London Film Festival has, to be honest, been very hard work, and it’s also taught me that I quite definitely have no desire to move back to London. For the first four nights, I was staying in a hostel just off Picadilly – the location was wonderful, but the whole place had the atmosphere of a reconditioned and redecorated Romanian mental hospital (For anyone who’s played the computer game Half Life 2, just look at the Nova Prospekt level, and you’ll have a pretty good idea) – plus, in an act of complete lunacy, the damn place didn’t actually have any kind of kitchen, so I was completely stuck with eating on the move. After that, I was staying at a friend’s house in Seven Sisters in north London, which was an awful lot nicer, but the experience of being in the grime and the noise of London virtually non-stop didn’t bring back any kind of warm nostalgia. All it did was remind me how despite all the havoc that surrounded my move out of London, the actual move itself was very sensible, and it’s given me a little perspective on Manchester – it’s a place that has its own share of noise and grime, but for the most part Manchester is like the best bits of London with the volume turned down, and it’s certainly somewhere I’ll be able to cope with for a while.

Life in London was hard work, and living Festival life is, as I’ve recorded before on this blog, exceptionally hard work at times, and doesn’t always feel like it was designed to be done by human beings. It didn’t really help that the LFF isn’t a particularly user-friendly festival, and is also (as was pointed out to me by one fellow journalist) surprisingly unfestive – there’s not really much sense of anything being celebrated. It’s simply lots and lots of work, and the sense that no matter what requests you may put in or screenings you may want to catch, there’s always somebody else the festival staff will be happy to prioritise. Several films I could have done with seeing I ended up missing – the requests weren’t granted with no explanation as to why, while at least a couple of films I saw and then found out the damn things are getting a release within the next couple of weeks, meaning my chances of getting a review out of them are virtually zero. On top of this, I got invited to an interview for the temp Christmas job I applied for in Manchester – only to find that the interview day was while I was still in London and they had no intention of rescheduling. Several disappointments and frustrations like this occurred throughout the last few days – it was one of those Murphy’s Law-like periods where anything that can go wrong does – and I did find myself emotionally falling to pieces, having the kind of days where I’d regularly find myself crying and almost physically unable to stop – emotional and physical exhaustion, mainly brought on through lack of sleep, but also the general situation I’m in getting on top of me. A film festival is not the right place for an emotional meltdown.

However, a couple of days ago things settled in my mind. Instead of being hideously angry and frustrated (a feeling that comes just as much from my own sense of wounded self-worth as it does from general reasons), I decided to do the right thing, and approach things in a positive frame of mind. Ultimately, that’s what I want out of life. It’s like I get tunnel vision when I get stressed, and all I’m capable of looking at is the problem that’s right in front of me – wherever I look, it’s all that I can see, and I’ll almost tear my own mind to shreds with stress until suddenly the blinkers fall away, and I’ll realise that it’s actually not quite as big a problem as I’d thought. It is nice to know that, just occasionally, I am capable of getting the dogs in my head to stop barking.

So, I’m back in Manchester – and I’m warming up for NaNoWriMo. I might even make it along to the Kick-Off meeting that’s happening in the centre of town tomorrow. I figure that it’s a good way/excuse/reason to meet people, and it’ll give me fewer excuses for putting off my next burst of writing. I’ve got plenty to do, especially in reference to drumming up some proofreading work – I no longer have any excuses for putting that off – but I’m also keen on writing the follow-up to The Hypernova Gambit. If only I could come up with a decent title…

After a frantic morning of packing and sorting, I’m ready for my next adventure. I’ll be setting off for eight days back in London, doing as much as I can at the London Film Festival – there’s also some other stuff I need to sort out, but hopefully I’ll be able to meet up with some people and do some socialising. I want this to be a practical trip, but I also want to actually have some fun at the same time. It’s been a little tough for the last couple of days, but I’m going to throw myself into this and see what happens.

A quick update – it’s looking very likely that I’m going to be doing NaNoWriMo this year. Once I’m back from the LFF, the chance to sit down for a while and just write like crazy might be exactly what I need – I’ll be working on the follow-up to The Hypernova Gambit, and it’ll be interesting to see exactly how many words I can put down on the page when I’m really pushing myself.

There’ll be more TV and Holmes-related posts soon (I spent most of the last 48 hours slumped in front of the TV with some Hagen-Daaz icecream, and the frankly bizarre combination of the Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes adaptations and S1 of The Shield…), but right now, I gotta run…

Tick tock tick tock…

Three weeks. 21 days. And I’m still alive.

I have tried, over the last few days, to dip my toe into a little of Manchester’s night life. Friday, I hung out in the FAB Cafe, a wonderfully groovy Sci-Fi theme bar (complete with Dalek and old Gerry Anderson TV21 covers framed on the walls) which was slightly let down by their decision to play decent music so quietly you could barely notice it was there over the sound of other people talking. Then, last night I snuck along to the Tiger Lounge for a ‘Psychotronic Film Night’ of Eraserhead and Wild At Heart. The place itself was great, an atmospheric sixties-style dive bar complete with weird wallpaper– the crowd was a little strange (as you’d expect from a David Lynch double bill), and I was slightly worried by the hairy leather-jacket wearing guy who seemed to be getting a little too excited and entertained by entirely the wrong moments in Wild At Heart. The films themselves… well, Eraserhead is still an endurance test (although a truly fascinating and skin-crawlingly perverse one), and I’d forgotten how ballistically insane Wild At Heart is – it’s the demented Fifties/Elvis vibe that makes the film completely otherworldly, and it’s got a realy sense of energy to it. It’s also refreshing to see a Lynch film that doesn’t put the narrative completely through the wringer, and which also features a young and energetic Nicolas Cage before winning the Oscar and appearing in action movies drained all the spirit out of his acting.

Today was a little difficult. I find it hard at times to cope with the fact that I am single again – that I’m in a situation where I am, essentially, alone, and am likely to be for quite some time. It’s never a mode of living I was particularly comfortable with, and I’ve never been especially good at the whole process of meeting people and acquiring new friends. Nevertheless, however tempted I may be to curl up in the corner and hide, I’ve got to keep myself going. I can’t let this beat me. I’m going to get through this, and I’m going to be stronger as a result.

I’ve got tomorrow – `and then, life gets really weird as I return to London for a limited nine-day engagement to do as much of the London Film Festival as I can handle. Hold onto your hats – it’s going to be a bumpy ride…