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Turnabout is Fair Play?Posted by dhoffman on November 21st, 2008

An interesting day.  I spent most of the morning working — that’s “day job” work — and then suddenly it was late afternoon and Jessy was leaving for Boston and now it’s me, Jack the Dog and Missy (who doesn’t feel comfortable being referred to as, “Missy the Cat”) left to our own devices until Sunday night.

I need to buy a lamp.

I did write today, ~2,400 words, which technically puts us over 40,000 words but I’ve moved some stuff around and integrated some other ideas and so I don’t want to give myself credit for the “old” stuff until it gets integrated into the “new” stuff.

I started writing today and, well, if you want to think of this as the second half of the story, that’s probably not too far off.  Go back in the blog a few posts and you can see I’ve been fighting myself a bit, and I’m hoping things brighten up soon.

To wit: I started writing one thing today and quickly found myself writing something completely different.  Nikki, for her part, gave me the finger and said, “this is what I’m doing so suck it down.”  Not very nice of her, I must say, but there you have it.

So, now I’m working on writing my way out of a corner.  Once I get past that — it’s a small corner — I have a significantly larger corner to write my way out of.  Probably an even bigger one past that (not up to even thinking about that just yet).  Once I get past all that fun, things should be relatively easy.  Unless they’re not.

I need to polish off this chapter and see what I’m doing with the next one.  I’m hoping Nikki behaves herself a bit but, to be honest, I don’t expect her to accommodate me.

God knows I’ve inconvenienced her enough.  Figure she just thinks its my turn to get kicked in the teeth.

One Step Forward, Two Steps Back?Posted by dhoffman on November 21st, 2008

Another 1,510 words (so far) tonight, and some of them will replace the earlier stuff, it’s probably not as many as I might think.

Purged ourselves almost entirely of Had’s, and what a glorious thing that is, too.

We’re somewhere around 37,600 words, or so, though that will go down as it goes up (as some new stuff replaces old stuff, but old stuff will expand and cease to be awkward, one hopes).

I’ll update the word count on the NaNoWriMo website when I know where we’re landing for the night — or tomorrow.

Going to go watch The Office now, unless the DVR crapped the bed again.

Figure I should break 40,000 tomorrow.  Madness.

I Hate “Had”Posted by dhoffman on November 20th, 2008

Started off Chapter Eleven and about 2,400 words, give or take, so far today.

This next bit will be rough to explain, so bear with me, okay . . .

In this chapter, by necessity, I’m sort of starting in the middle of soemthing, then working my way backwards.  I’ve started things out nicely, but the “looking back” part of things is kind of annoying.

I’ve got lots of sentences that sound really nice, but then I remember I need to change them around.  So, “Nikki slammed the phone down,” turns into, “Nikki had slammed the phone down.”

Most days, I really hate the word, “had.”

I’m going to take a little break and revisit what I’ve written already, see if I can’t maybe expand a drop on the “middle” and allow me to play around a bit with the “had” part of things.  Come to that, maybe I have a way to hit this, anyway . . .

36,132 words on this, the twentieth of November.  Assuming I get back into it again later (as I fully plan to), I might actually crack 40,000 words tonight.  As I’ve said repeatedly, I’m not-so-much sweating the 30 days for 50,000 words thing for NaNoWriMo (initially, I didn’t think there was any way I could pull it off), and the final book will be more like 65,000 to 75,000 words or so.

But, it’s still nice to be on track like that.  Ideally, I’d be thrilled to hit THE END before December 1, regardless of how many words the thing was.  Getting that tag over there on the right side of the screen to say, “Winnar” or whatever it’s going to say, will be a fine feather in my cap, to boot.