Beautiful Handcrafted Animals

3,185 new words.

45,339 words total.

10.5 hours to go.

Closing in on it.

Just popping in for a moment — 1,464 so far tonight, with more incoming.

Just got over a hump (ProTip: reading back through the sections you think are crap is a great way to see that, hey, they’re not) and things are moving well.

More to come.

Edit: another 1,035 after that, but there was “oh, Jack you look so cuddly” and then “I’ll just sidle up on the ottoman for a moment”, followed, some time later by “shit, I passed out on the couch.”

Quickly, as I’m sleepy as hell, I think I wrote ~3,583 words today, give or take. It’s a rough one, and part of the issue is that as much as I wrote, I probably deleted, slightly more. Which is not to say that we’re in the hole. What I mean to say is I probably wrote DOUBLE what I’ve got in the word count as “new”.

So it goes.

As you get nearer and nearer to the finish line, it can be difficult getting into the places one needs to get into. Is it boredom? am I tired of writing about them? No, sir or madame, I am not.

But I’m tired, and probably not making much sense. 3,583 words for today, which really means, 3,583 words which only brought me over the 40,000 word mark by four little words.

I’m going to sleep now. We have a lot ahead of us for tomorrow.

Just pounded out 1,093 new words, which is actually closer to 2k because I deleted a bunch before I got started.

I’ve got some stuff to do tonight, but I’m hoping to get another 1-3,000 words in before bedtime.

So, I wrote 2,819 words tonight, bringing us just inches from 40,000 (which is to say, I have my work cut out for me the next three nights), and that would be a much happier number if I hadn’t . . . deleted a drop more than a thousand words.

Still, it had to be done.  I can hem and haw all I want, cheat and play games, but that’s not going to make this a valid experiment, project, whatever you want to call it.

Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.

11,833 words to the finish line.  The first finish line.  I figure the book is actually a little more than half-way finished.  I can’t really imagine that, a month from now, after sitting on this silly thing for freaking years, always meaning to get to it, intending to get to it, maybe even spending a night writing 1,000 or even 2,000 words (which I would later discard, or save in a file I probably couldn’t find right now), I might actually get to the finish line.

Pretty exciting.

This NaNoWriMo business is good stuff.  Yes, the pressure is a bit much, but that also keeps me going.  The last three nights have been especially rough going.  I went back over my notes and old sections on this character I like so much and discovered most of what I had was crap.  Lazy crap.  Overwritten,  over-descriptive, indulgent crap.

I was shooting for word counts and oh my, did I have them.

So, there was starting from scratch to do, and that was an opportunity to remake this particular character into something even more than what I’d originally done.  It was exciting, and I think I’m on a good track, but it certainly wasn’t easy going.

And, my eyes are starting to cross, the hour is growing silly and I have to get up in just a drop under three hours.

Three more days!

I went to sleep, that’s what happened.

About midnight I went into the other room to play with Jack the Dog and, after about a half-hour or so, the prospect of staying up to four a.m. or so just seemed bleak and painful.

“I should take a night off,” I said to myself.  “Recharge the old batteries.”

“But you’re still 13,000 words away,” I replied.  “You need every night you can get.

Now, I was considering taking a day from work to make up some difference, but that’s not happening now.  No worries.  I managed convince myself that sleep was in my best interests, so now I have double the work to do tonight.

Something else interesting: I realized that I haven’t so much as cracked open a book since starting in on the NaNoWriMo project.  Which is to say, I haven’t been reading at all.  I think I listened to Bruce Campbell’s audiobook, How To Make Love The Bruce Campbell Way, but I’m the kind of guy who always has a book on me.

Weird.

I picked up Stephen King’s The Mist yesterday and am chugging through it.  I was curious to see how closely the movie stuck to the original story (aside from the ending, which was very different, and the screaming babies, which were movie-theater exclusive).  So far, it’s pretty faithful, excepting that the book is, um, twenty-seven years old.

I was also thumbing through Jonathan Carroll’s The Land of Laughs, one of my all-time favorite books.  Have you read any Carroll?  You’re missing out, really you are.  Pick up LoL (hey, I never noticed that before), Bones of the Moon or Sleeping in Flame — any one of those are a great introduction to a storyteller who will change the way you look at the world, at books, yourself . . . lots of stuff.

Most highly recommended.

Finally, I realized yesterday that I had inadvertently given one of my characters a name which is VERY evocative of one of the inspirations for the story.  I don’t know that it would be immediately obvious in the sense that it would give away twists or endings or things, but it’s certainly not something I’m just going to toss on the table to flop, twitch and draw attention to itself like a dying fish (nice metaphor).

For the record, though, and should anyone someday actually care, no, it wasn’t on purpose.  It’s good, though, and I guess that’ll work.