The Final Stretch

Here it comes. I'm currently running about 40,113 words. I'm actually slightly ahead of quota today, but I'll fall under quota today if I don't write. I'm going to get settled into the writing in just a few moments.

During the holiday, I spent time with my brother and we played Lord of the Rings: the Third Age on the PlayStation 2. I got to enjoy spending time with family, plenty of turkey loaded with good taste and tryptophan. I got loaded with comfort food, Amish friendship bread, sugary cookies, home cooking, and good times.

My brother and I also broke through a tough boss battle with the Orcs in the Lord of the Rings game. We were at the level in Osgiliath, fighting to defend the bridge. It took us five tries before we had our tactics down right and got to beat the boss: Gothmog the Orc General. His minions attacked us and nearly wiped us out.

So, now it's time to hit that novel and put some mileage on it.

Rounding The Turn

I've gotten a nice lead on my quota leading into Thanksgiving. Unlike my last post, I got ahead of quota for real. I've been building it in units, about twice the normal quota per day. I'll be able to spend time with relatives, instead of with my novel. It's nice to have that word count "cushion" to fall back on. I'll be a little under quota at the end of the holiday, but not enough to ruin my project.

Gathering Momentum

The story is still cranking away, complete with strange ideas injected as characters discuss the history of the far future, the last recorded years of several planets, and what the archaeologists just dug up.

Ancient data storage devices may one day be used as an archaeological source, in much the same way that shards of pottery, arrowheads, bits of preserved clothing, and mummies do in the present. Imagine a future society digging through the ruins of America, what would they did up?

Maybe a stack of "floppy diskettes," or better "records." The archival properties of plastic or vinyl may not be the same as clay or stone, however. I wonder if any data about our culture would be able to survive centuries or millennia required to become an archaeological find. Will the Earth as we know it even survive that long?

My word count has topped 18,250. I'm actually over quota (despite that nasty loss the Buckeyes suffered against the Fighting Illini), so I could decide not to write for a day and still meet my deadline. I'm quite proud of that. Usually my creative juices start to run down as winter approaches, so I'm quite happy that I'm still producing this far into November.

Confounded Flaming Pants!

As in "liar, liar, pants on fire!"

...I got my spreadsheet to calculate my quotas for me. But I found out something was wrong somewhere in the middle of my writing: I'm behind by about 4,000 words! It got stuck on the 9th and wasn't adding how many days I had been writing since the 9th.

So I've managed to put in twice the normal number of words, but I'm still fighting to keep ahead of my quota. It'll take a bit longer to figure up the problem, but I'll get back on top.

Kicking It Up!

NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writer's Month) has initiated, so I have been plugging away at 1600+ word quotas each day and faring pretty well. I practiced back in June and July, but this is for real.

I hope to keep ahead of quota and finish, since I succeeded back in the summer. The goal is to produce a 50,000 word work of fiction. This can be classified as a "novel" but the main point is to hit the quota mark in thirty days. It was fun to do this back in the summer, and I am beginning to have fun with the story I'm writing right now.

It's science fiction, and there's a whole community at NaNoWriMo.org devoted to science fiction. I've read some of the forums and posted a few of my thoughts there. All in all, it's been a major distraction from more important things, but I could see how the forums could be interesting and useful. The part where I call it a distraction is mainly the amount of replies a post can get even after I feel like it should've ended.

There are some forum posts that look very interesting that I won't read, just because there's more than twenty or thirty replies posted on just that one thread. To me, that's information overload.

Anyway, I'll try to post semi-regularly this month, under the NaNoWriMo label so people can see.

What's my current word count? 7200 even. Wow.