Mission 032: Where Susan stops larking about

Aha. I knew these months of wandering the world and filling my brain with all kinds of curious cultural facts was bound to come to an end sometime. The money had to run out, and did. The line of travel had to finish somewhere, and has.
Now I am in Auckland, it is raining, and all around me the city is working, eating and...windsurfing, it would appear. Although I'm not really into windsurfing, I would like to be eating, and for that, I need to start... working. My mission is simple: to become gainfully employed.
I checked the paper on the weekend for jobs: nothing doing there in the advertising, media or publishing world. But the field of adult entertainment had lots of openings. (No pun intended!) I also found plenty of other unappealing jobs: cafe staff (no thanks), taxi driving (no chance) and childminding (no patience).
So tomorrow I will start looking seriously - with recruitment agents, friends of friends, job sites and, then, cold-contacting design and advertising agencies. Susan M Wills, copywriter and editor, words in waiting. Here I go, on the other side of the world, off to work.
Wish me luck. And some fine weather.

Mission 017 - 50,000 words

I've spent much of the day researching blogs. Partly for work (might be doing a work blog), partly to see what else is out there. One link led to another and eventually I ended up at NaNoWriMo, the site for National Novel Writing Month. I actually joined this last year (or was it the year before?), and didn't write a word. This year, I seem to have ended up there the very day before it all kicks off, which seems like quite a nice piece of serendipity. So I joined. Again. And my new mission flowered into being: to write 50,000 words before the end of November 2007.

I know NaNoWrMo isn't the way to instantly produce a work of prize-winning quality. But it's a way to produce A Work. Which is a start. It means writing around 1700 words a day, and no, I can't cobble together the 30,000 I've already written on Untitled Novel 1. They have to be all fresh – quite a steep challenge if you're in full-time work. But not necessarily if you work as an in-house copywriter and seem to be hitting a quiet patch...
We'll see.