Highmoon's Ponderings

Wordcount: 47,009

Ok, exactly 12 hours to the end of November and NaNoWriMo. I have 3000 words to go to make 50,000 exactly, but I intend to write a little more to give me some padding.

My friend today? Coffee, lots and lots of coffee.

I am SO tired. But I WILL make it.

Let the countdown begin.

Word count at 44,239 as I go to bed on what is for me still Day 28. I just need to write at least 3000 words between today and tomorrow and I will make my goal.

My fingers are tired and I am barely awake as it is; I know I will be the walking dead on Friday, and I can’t wait.

Funny thing is, at 50K, I will still have some 30K more to go before I have a complete story. For someone who had never written a story longer than 8000 words, this is pretty unbelievable.

Got back today from our Thanksgiving Weekend getaway to the mountains of western North Carolina. The place was beautiful, the scenery truly breathtaking, but I have no idea how city folk can live up there. I can see the allure of the country; I had a lot of fun hiking and visiting a great cavern and only one of hundreds of awesome waterfalls, but I can’t quite deal with the isolation from civilization for more than a few days, let alone the issue of there being almost no Jews up there. Considering we were in prime Billy Graham country, I’m not surprised there aren’t any Jews outside of Asheville. I should have pictures up on Flickr by tomorrow.

NaNoWriMo will be done in 4 days and I am way behind in my writing. My word count while in NC was a bust; I wrote as regularly as I could, and I certainly got a number of words in, but as Day 27 is about to come to a close, I am barely above the 40K mark, having only 3 days to write 9,000 words. I will do it, however, I will succeed. I did not get this far to fail within spitting distance of the finish line. I am taking a short break right now, having some cereal, and then it’s back to the grind with me, trying to complete at least 2,500 words tonight, if not a full 3,000.

Good night and wish me luck.

This is it, the last week of NaNoWriMo; just 9 more days to complete the more-or-less 18K words I am missing at the moment, which means every day from now until next Thursday I need to write 2000 words, no excuses. I’ve come too far to quit or fail now.

The manuscript has morphed a couple of times during writing this last week. At one point it was the mix of travel/spiritual memoir I had originally envisioned, then the travel part sort of took over, then the spiritual journey asserted itself. At this point I’d say it’s the spiritual journey that has taken center stage, and I forsee a read-through of the eventual first draft will only confirm this, which means there’s already a lot of editing and rewriting in store for the second draft, whenever that time comes.

Tomorrow I leave for North Carolina for the weekend. I’ll be taking my laptop and intend to write at our friend’s house as well. This isn’t quite like last year’s trip to Paris, where the time is far better spent out exploring the city, so I’m expecting, aside from a couple of activities we do have planned, finding time to write won’t be a problem.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Argh. At the start of Week 3, and mid-point of the month, I am not quite where I should or wanted to be, though truth be told, I am not horribly behind either. Right before the stroke of Midnight, I managed to crack 23K (23,182 to be precise) but only after a really hard push since the day before. Sunday and Monday were not good writing days for a variety of reasons (those Real life things that actually do take precedence over NaNo and that there’s no way to account for) with just over 1200 words between both days. I’m about 2000 words behind right now, nothing that I can’t make up either by dividing those among all the remaining days, or with a really good writing day.

At the start of Week 3 I realize I am probably rambling a little too much. Almost at the half-point of the book, I am just barely getting to the second big point in the memoir out of 6 or 7 total. I am not worried about writing too much (if anything this assures I will not run out of stuff to write before reaching 50K) but I can already tell the Editor-Me is going to have a field day with this first draft. Still, chugging along, writing, writing, writing and leaving the editing for later on. The one good thing is that I feel my memoir technique is getting a little better. It’s a different form of writing, even if it somewhat resembles fiction, and I’m learning the rules as I go along, both from practice and from a book I’m reading, Writing Your Life: Putting your Past on Paper, by Lou Willet Stanek.

Back to writing now. At least I have some new music to help me out, but that will be another post.

I’m sleepy today. After writing almost 3000 words yesterday today is going very slow. Gonna try to a push now.

Check out this nifty report on my word count:
http://www.nanowrimo.org/NanowrimoUtils/ProgressReport/106651.html

It doesn’t quite match my own running word count, much like the graph on the sidebar, because the NaNo system counts days by the calendar, and I count days as the time between me getting up and going to sleep. Later on I’ll post my own word count chart. Still, a great tool.