Just under the wire: I made it!

It is by no means done, but I got the 50,000 words in before midnight, despite the best efforts of dying cars, sick cats, family emergencies, and the Thanksgiving holiday. Right now it's a pile of poo, but it is going to be a novel someday soon, oh yes.

25,000 words!

I am SO behind. Why is it that whenever I try to do NaNo that a giant train wreck of things conspire to thwart me? Writing must be my divinely-ordained profession, because Satan and his minions sure seem hell-bent on throwing monkey wrenches.

My computer is making ominous "last gasp" noises, we had to replace our car, spouse has so few students that we are making decisions like "pay the power bill or buy food?", our oldest cat has developed hyperthyroidism, and the well house roof is in danger of rotting through. And let's not talk about holiday stuff. Still, winning this is not impossible, just hard. I'm not giving up just yet.

NaNoWriMo: day 6, breaking 10,000!

Not a great day for daily word count, but... 10,146, baby!

NaNoWriMo: day 5

A bit of a slog today, only 1,200 or so words today. Part of the blame lies on finding out that our car is utterly not worth fixing, and so we are sans vehicle (a good, reliable one, anyway) for the time being. Boo.

Oh, well. Yesterday I jammed and got my average way back up to where I'm in good shape. Yay me! Yesterday, by the end of the day, it was an ugly pile of words. Today it's slowly starting to take the shape of a novel instead of a pile of word garbage.

Someday it will be a first draft!

Day two: NaNoWriMo

I'm a bit behind but I WILL catch up. Tomorrow is another day etc.

Also: this is my first serious attempt at going full-tilt at a novel, and HOLY EXPLETIVE IT'S A PILE OF POO so far, but I guess that's normal.

Just keep swimming just keep swimming just keep swimming....

Last day before NaNoWriMo

I feel your panic, marmalade cat.

...and I'm kind of terrified. Am I ready? No. Is anybody ever really ready? I vowed to Be Prepared like a good little scout, but I'm way behind. Today's goal is to sketch out fifteen more scenes. I banged out fifteen yesterday, and that will give me thirty scenes/chapters which is a good place to start. They will no doubt be shuffled, re-worked, and some of them scrapped and/or replaced before it's all over, but at least I'll have a framework to start hanging words on.

Still kind of scared.

Tenting with panthers

...and I just realized we missed Elanor's birthday on the second! I'm a terrible mom!!!! Yeah, she's "just" a cat, but that's still lame. She's my youngest and will be my baby for a long time. Happy second birthday, Spook! May the coming year bring you many more (safe) adventures.

National Novel Writing Month is nigh

Recent events in my life have reminded me that if you don't do get moving and try to do those things that you really want to do ASAP, then you may get to the end of your life never having done anything. With that in mind, I'm going to jump off the deep end and charge into National Novel Writing Month, colloquially known as NaNoWriMo, in a few weeks. It's a personal challenge to write at least 50,000 words in the month of November: basically, get a book written. It's do-able, I just have to DO IT.

I took a stab at it back in 2006 but was derailed when the Spouse's computer died and I loaned him mine to keep him functional. I think I was about 18,000 words in when that happened. I probably still could have done it, but between writing challenges and other life stuff that November, I was pretty much doomed.

This year the decks are more clear, I have more than one machine to write on, and I'm kicking around an idea for what I think could be a fun, lightweight romance novel. I am "outlining" and casting it even now. Stay tuned...