OMG.

I did it.

I came. I saw. I conquered NaNoWriMo 2007's butt!!

Although I still have to finish the last chapter, I have surpassed the 50K word count that is required to be a NaNo winner! Go me! Go me! By my count, I have exactly 50,026 words at this moment. I cannot tell you how pleased as punch I am!! Looking back at the posts I've made for November, it seemed that I was always behind. Always trying to catch up. Well, no matter! 7 full hours ahead of time, I am a winner!

For those of you who see this blog and think that you don't have enough time to undertake something like this, get rid of those excuses. If I can do this while working full-time, working part time, going to school full-time, making a Thanksgiving dinner for my family, hosting a family sleep over, keeping a social life with friends and DH (and the list goes on) - all in the month of November - So. Can. You.

44,412.

I'm so tired I'm seeing double. I'm supposed to be at 45K by tonight, but 600 off is going to have to do. The good news is that I can see a light at the end of the tunnel. Two tunnels, if you insist. First, Friday is the last day of NaNo; 50K here I come. Second, I'm certain that when I cross the 50K finish line, my current novel will be complete.

Now, I personally think that it jumped the shark about two chapters back, but I have December to go back and edit with.

C'est la vie.

37,830. Sigh.

This four day weekend was not the writing adventure I had expected it to be. I spent Thursday afternoon cooking, after spending a little time playing catch up on the writing that morning. Then my parents announced that they were coming for a visit on Friday.

Uh oh.

So after dinner, I had to do some serious straightening up for them. And that also meant that I would do ZERO writing on Friday. By Saturday afternoon after they had left, I was drained and took a three hour nap. Fortunately, I did get up and spend a lot of time writing. Unfortunately, no where near what I needed to do. I'm at 37,830 at this moment and I should have had 40K yesterday.

I'm now starting to question whether or not I'll hit 50K by Friday. Type, D., type!

Creeping along. Creeping. Creeping. Creeping along.

Yesterday I was so full energy about my story really taking shape. Now I just want to stab the next person who says NaNo. Well. Not really. It's just that who decided NOVEMBER with turkey day as a major theme would be a good month?! There are a million things going on in my personal world and yet I labor and toil over this damn novel.

Could I be a little cranky because it's a little late? Yeah. Probably.

Come back tomorrow. Perhaps I'll be in a better mood by then.

Doubt it.

OMG! I've been forgetting to blog! :)

Wow. I can't believe a week has passed since I've been here. To give you a heads up, I've fallen woefully behind. Again. As of this moment, I have 26,211 words and I'm procrastinating catching up. I think I'm supposed to be around 30,000 words right now. Oh well. I still have another eight hours before I go to bed. Let's see what I can do in that time.

And guess what! I submitted "Soldier" to a publisher today! 60 day turn-around-time to find out if they absolutely hated it, think it's merely ok, or if they think its publish-worthy. Wish me well. So far, five of five friends who were supposed to be editors got caught up in the story and about halfway through forgot to edit. Or perhaps my writing just got so good by that point that they didn't need to? One can only hope.

21,779. Thank goodness for three day weekends.

I finally caught up to where I need to be after the hiatus in Atlanta. In fact, since I plan on doing some more later on tonight, I will probably be almost two days ahead of schedule. With Thanksgiving quickly approaching, I need to make certain that I am ahead or else have to suffer through another weekend of doing almost nothing except working on this novel.

The title for the novel appears to be "The Voice". In fact, I'm thinking now that the title to my other novella may just remain "Soldier" as I had originally called it for lack of another title.

Finally, after 12 days of writing, I'm really getting into the story. The bad guy - I have a thing for bad guys - sounds intriguing.

It's only fair that I post the same excerpt here that I posted on NaNo:

“You ok?” he said.

“Just really, really tired.” She stifled a yawn. “I don’t know about you, but the painkillers didn’t do much. I just want to lie down and hope I don’t ache this badly in the morning.”

“Can I help?”

“Anything in particular in mind?” she said. As the words came out of her mouth, she froze, hoping they didn’t sound as suggestive to him as they did to her.

“Actually,” he paused. “If it’s not too forward, I do give a pretty good massage. You’re probably going to hate life in the morning, but we can try working out some of the kinks now so that it won’t be too bad.”

“You don’t even seem fazed,” she commented. Mentally, the angel on her left shoulder and the devil on the right shoulder battled fiercely. Cherry had been watching his hands at dinner and they seemed so incredibly large and capable. The idea of a massage was deliciously tempting. Then again, their level of intimacy would raise another notch if she allowed him to run his hands over her body carte blanche. But boy did that sound good.

Really good.

***
12,185 as of right now. Type, fingers type!

Let the Marathon begin! I have fallen so behind with NaNo. I think I'm somewhere around 8800 words. The fact that I can only "think" what my word count is should tell you something. The trip to Atlanta was wonderful, but I just didn't get the writing in that I had expected to. Also had some hiccups with the Alphasmart and I may have to return it.

In any event, I'm planning on doing at least 20,000 words by Monday evening - today being Friday. It's a three day weekend; I'm not scheduled to work and my school assignments are caught up. I'll be back on Monday to tell you how I did!

4699. After three days of NaNo, I've fallen behind by about 400 words. I don't feel too badly about that seeing how I worked a twelve hour shift yesterday which was the cause for the delay. I am heading for Atlanta later today and between the time at the airport and being cooped up in a hotel room by myself tonight, I'll make up the 400 words and some. Unfortunately, this also probably means being out of touch with the Internet for a few days so you'll have to wait until Wednesday to see how far I've managed to come!

On another note, for the trip I bought an Alphasmart 2000 - yes, the really old version. Unfortunately, I failed to notice that the one I purchased didn't come with the cable, so now I'm trying to find a USB infrared adaptor to use. I'm going to take my chances on it working once I get the adaptor and take it on the trip with me. Please, please, please let it work! My hand is cramping from having to hand write my novel when I'm mobile. sigh.