I mean virtually literally. As in not posting to blogs, forums, etc, at all. Just writing.

I'm on vacation. Which means, strangely, that I have less time, not more, for writing, it would seem.

Anyhow, I'm ahead of schedule but behind my personal schedule, which was to finish the 50000 before Thursday. As today is early Wednesday and I'm still working on meeting yesterday's quota I'm not at all sure that it's going to happen. I always like to go green for a while, and this year finally will go purple at some point. I've been uploading my novel via the website which knocks 100+ words off my wordcount. I believe those are the em-dashes, of which I have more than usual (they replace semicolons, of which I have fewer than usual). In order to go green before going purple I will have to estimate my count and enter it in the little box at the top of the NaNo site.

Anyhoo. Let me get back to the story, which is stuck, and which is all filler right now. Gah. I thought the idea of a story within a story was a good one, and it did get me to 40,000. But the last 10,000 are proving to be hell.

Think of a mouse in a glue trap. Or don't, if you prefer. That's me right now. Mouse. Glue. Me.



Cheers.

Travelling. And Obama. And 100 other responsibilities.

Those are the second reasons.

So here we are, almost middle of the month, and I really haven't been posting all that much.

Two reasons.

One, I've been writing more than any other NaNo. Don't mind the graphs below. They are inaccurate for a couple of reasons, not least of which is unreliable internet access. I couldn't post my words on Sunday (daily total 1843) or Tuesday (daily total 2185) and Wednesday's total was low because I spent a lot of my writing time drawing a floor plan (daily total 153). So Thursday's number is screwed too.

But I've been writing. The story is going well, though sometimes momentum isn't easy to keep up. I expect to reach 50,000 easily. I had thought of going for more but last year when I did that I got tingly fingertips. I want to have the use of my hands for a couple more decades, if not more, so I am not pushing myself. 50,000+ is damn good for any month, thank you very much.

But maybe the time has come to post snippets here. So I shall.

Here's the opening, or part thereof:

---

I

It was late by the time everybody in the house was asleep – morning almost. At first she’d lain awake for what seemed hours, waiting. Then she decided that it might make more sense to get some sleep and wake up in the middle of the night, the way people did in books. Of course, they didn’t have cell phones or anything sensible like that, but those people could wake themselves up by repeating the hour they wanted to get up over and over to themselves before they fell asleep. The cell phone her father’d given her on her last birthday was a piece of crap, but it had an alarm. She decided that she would try the book-trick, but she set the phone alarm just in case. She finally fell asleep after whispering three o’clock ten times or so, and when she woke, in the dark, the cell phone hadn’t beeped yet. She smiled to herself. The thing worked.

The night had lost its heat and the air of the early morning was fresh and thick with dew. She let herself out the bathroom kitchen door, which squealed less than the others when opened, and whose iron grille was easier to shut from the outside. As she snapped the padlock back into place, pocketing the extra key, wondering for the thousandth time why her father was too cheap to get a different kind of lock for the door, something with a handle and a deadlock, something vaguely twenty-first century, her stomach made a leap, as though it wanted to take off, to go flying, and a momentary lightness filled her head and set her heart thudding. She was finally going to do it!

The community centre was not far away at all – two small city blocks and up the hill. At this time of morning there were only a few people on the road. She’d dressed as androgynously as she could, in jeans and a sleeveless hoodie, and she walked fast, her head down, trusting that nothing would stop her from getting into the centre, trusting her recent lessons in martial arts to protect her if anything grabbed her from behind, and feeling a small sense of disappointment when nothing did. In the dark, her slimness made many people mistake her for a boy. Not necessarily something that would protect her in every situation, but at least boys weren’t usually attacked in the same way as girls. People generally confronted boys, got up in their faces. Girls they just grabbed.

The walk from Queen to the junction of George and King was well lit, with the Hilton Colonial on the northern side of the road and, once across Cumberland, with the nightclub on the south. The club was closing down. Clubs in town did. They opened, flourished for a few years if they were lucky, and then high overheads and violent clientele took their toll and they closed and moved elsewhere. The only people left tonight were the bouncers and the owners, people Lesley knew by sight from her nighttime perambulations, and who never bothered with her. But George Street was dark. It was lined with trees of every sort, broad-leaved and feathered, podded and flowering, and in the daytime these gave a welcome shade to the sidewalks. But in the night, the shadow under their branches was solid.

She stopped opposite the cathedral, took a deep breath, and then began walking up the hill. Before she reached the Towne, whose lobby still glowed with a warm light, she crossed the road. The community centre was on the other side, older than most of the buildings around it. Its current reincarnation was a recent one, part of the church’s community outreach. The cathedral didn’t have the same kind of parish that other Anglican churches did, being the city church, but the vestry felt it had a social responsibility anyway. She knew this well enough – hadn’t her mother had the vestry members over to the house for tea just the week before? And so the church hall was to be turned into a community centre, and the young priest, Father Jimmy, had collared her in the hallway as he was leaving.

“You’re going to help out, right?” he’d asked her. “We need all the help we could get.”

Yeah, right. She had two weeks left before going back to school and she was going to help them set up a community centre to cater to people who didn’t live anywhere near the church? The only people who lived in town these days, and specially this end of town, were the people in Queen Street, her Aunty Jazz, and the lowlifes who hung out round West Street and Virginia and Delancy. And when you got that far away from Cathedral there were any number of churches to choose from – St Mary’s and St Agnes and St Francis and the Greek Orthodox and St John’s and Bethel and Zion. The community Cathedral was looking to reach out to was about twenty people big.

But she had a strong feeling the whole point wasn’t service as much as it was politics. Her father was tired of being a senator. He wanted the power that came from being an elected member of parliament, not to mention the blue licence plate and the possibility of a ministerial position, and so was angling for a seat in the next election. He seemed to believe that the way to get himself noticed was by Doing Good. But doing good had to come from somewhere, from someplace real. You had to have some feeling for the people you were hoping to help. They were more than just heads on a platter for you to serve up on the campaign trail.

And so this was why Lesley Lewis was going to break into the Cathedral church hall with a backpack full of old rags, a packet of matches, and two twelve-ounce Aquapure bottles filled with gasoline.

but today I just want to think about Obama and the presidency and how this man is going to change the world and how fact is more interesting than fiction. Just for today. I'll be back at the novel tomorrow.

There's something to be said about starting the month on a Saturday. Made a date with my sis-in-law, who's NaNoing for the first time this year, to write in Starbucks all day long. We did so. We punched out 4000+ words each, and I added that to the 1000+ I wrote first thing in the morning.

Bells and whistles below:



Good start. Not up there with the crazies, I know, but not too shabby. Not too shabby at all.

In a couple of days I'll get all the bells and whistles. Today, though, I'm just focussing on writing. Want to knock out a goodly chunk to get things rolling. I'm competing for real again - not finishing anything that will count towards my wordcount, starting a brand new mystery.

So there.

This blog is dormant eleven months of the year because I have enough work to do on my other blogs in my real life. But NaNo has been inspirational to me and my prose fiction for the last, what, four years, so welcome back!

I blog here as Madison Hill. I blog here for NaNoWriMo. Pleased to meet you.

All righty then. Watch this space.

Made it to 50,000!!!

Got my green bar!!!

It's gonna stay green!!!

I like green!!!

(on another note, I have another 10,000 words to go to meet my personal goal. So no celebrating just yet. Still. This calls for a little recognition.)

Only 800+ words to go before greenness. But 10800+ to go before I hit my personal goal.

But the story's winding down. I'm feeling the end approach! I may hit it before I get to 60,000 words for the month. Odd to think that, and tempting -- I'm thinking of ways to cheat the story to get the wordcount. Not a good way to think, though, so I'm also trying not to.

And I have to go to work today. Tomorrow and Wednesday I have off -- not just to write, but to mark essays and to do some other stuff I'm being delinquent about. So there that is.

Cheersies!

Cracking the 45,000 mark.

Still behind on my personal goal, but I'll do my 50,000, no prob...

Deedle deedle deedle

November's almost gone.

This is the last weekend in the month! It's not the weekend to be behind, but it's the weekend I am behind.

My weeks have grown far more difficult, far less easy to navigate. Christmas is coming and with it evening events. Mornings are still OK, but instead of working between 6 and 8, I've been meeting.

So by the end of the week, I found myself almost 8,000 words (8,000 WORDS!!!) in the red. And I still have student essays to mark. Hm.

Still, this morning the catch-up began. Now I'm halfway to where I should be -- only 4,000 words behind.

This calls for a new image, dunnit?

This week is like swimming through molasses, or rolling a stone uphill.

Finally I'm behind -- a day or so, it's true, but behind nevertheless.

This is how I am this week. I've been struggling to hit 40,000 words for days, and am creeping towards the goal, hence:

So here's the thing.

I'm writing by the seat of my pants on this one. No plot, only a list of the major characters in the thing. I know who did the murder and why, but the way in which it reveals itself is a mystery to me.

So as I was writing two days ago, one of my characters got himself killed. As I was writing today, something else unexpected began to happen. I have no idea what it's going to be, and I don't even know if it's going to work, or if it's going to be appropriate.

There's something else about these genre novels. I'm afraid that the spin I'm putting on my themes is too expected, too predictably biased. Do I want to fall into the trap of the expected?

On another note, NaNo's down. Overload of writers. Victim of success.



My achievement and my mood:

I'd hoped to end this day ahead. I will; I'm already leading my proposed wordcount by just over 500 words. Now, though, my goal's to get to 35,000 by midnight.



The Bahamas has entered a word war with Lewis County, Washington State. We are getting our butts kicked. Essentially, only are two or three of the registered Bahamian affiliates are writing. But we're in the top five regions in terms of average wordcount. We were till recently no. 2, but the drop-off in my writing on Thursday and Friday has hurt us.

Anyway, here's the cute Writertopia cartoon:

Right around the time I should be getting ready for work.

Here's today's progress. I'll be happy when I crack 30,000.

I'd like to crack 25,000 tonight if I can, but we'll just have to see.

Another of Julie's cool word counter cartoons. Well, not Julie's, but Writertopia's through Julie.

Voilà.

Worked to do some catch-up today. Saving grace: inventing a funeral service from scratch.

And I made up the ground I lost the second half of the week.

So, a new meter, inspired by Julie.

Late for work, because I wrote 1200 words over breakfast, then I played around with the novel in various ways.

I do not complain. I am well ahead, and am continuing to fatten the wordcount so that when the crazy times come, later in the week or in the month, I can take days off without lagging behind.

That's the idea anyway. I'm also liking the book, at last.

Cheers.

Not doing so badly considering that I am working. The early morning brightness is helpful.

Another excerpt:

===========

Nick made up his mind.

"That's it for today, Stu," he called, as Stuart packed up his tools. "I got an appointment for the afternoon." He hadn't, but he was going to do his best to get one. No sense in working too long in the heat, even though it was February and still cool. "Tomorrow."

Stuart touched his temple, as he did, in silent salute, and disappeared. Nick followed more slowly, climbing into his Suzuki minibus with images of San Francisco still playing round the edges of his memory. The Golden Gates Bridge, the Embarcadero, the Presidio Park -- they allowed him to negotiate with patience and sweetness the snarl of traffic that clogged Nassau at lunchtime, and delivered him to the parking lot of the Wyndham Nassau Resort in the kind of mood that would charm the pants off anybody.

And it wasn't anybody's pants he was after. It was Gregory Macintosh's. If he was in.

Somehow, Nick though that he would be. And he was right. He was rarely wrong, anyway. If he trusted his instincts, they usually led him in directions that bore fruit, in the end. Macintosh was on the floor, observing the work of the front desk clerks, and Nick allowed himself to watch him supervise from a distance, standing half-hidden behind the huge pots of plants in the sweeping lobby. After about ten minutes, when Macintosh's expression had changed from imperious to impatient, he crossed the floor, a smile ready and inviting on his face, and stood at the end of the front desk.

The young woman Macintosh had just provided with advice glanced up, shot a look at Macintosh, then scooted over and lavished Nick with a smile.

"May I help you, sir?"

Nick played with the idea of asking for a penthouse room, and relented. "I came to see Mr. Macintosh," he said quietly, and let her turn around and signal the manager, whose expression changed from superiority to pleasant surprise in an instant. Without altering his demeanour one whit, Macintosh navigated over to Nick's end of the desk and managed to smile at him and continue his observation of his charges at the same time.

"You off in a while?"

Macintosh nodded. "How you know?"

"I didn't," said Nick. "I guessed."

"Good guess."

"Let's go for lunch then," said Nick. "I'm buying."

"Oh, no, you're not. I'm a manager in this hotel. I have privileges. If you wait over there, I'll arrange us a lunch that's worth it."