Handsome Dan, Play the Victory Sound!

As Howard Dean once said: YEARGH!

I am officially, as of right now, at 50,120 words. By NaNoWriMo rules, I am a winner!

Of course, there's still...oh...about 30% of the book left. Plus editing. Sadly, I have many more weeks of writing yet before I can even declare the narrative complete.

Still, producing 153 pages of prose in under a month is nothing I'm going to scoff at. I'm proud of what I've accomplished so far. Now, I have to finish the work I've started--or this doesn't mean much.

Getting There

Well, it took 7,000 words in the last 30 hours or so, but I'm officially back on pace--a full 78 words ahead of it, in fact, at 40,078 words.

I actually had a fun moment last night, when it struck me that a character I'd mentioned two chapters back as an almost throwaway (she was meant merely as evidence that failed Valkyries didn't get killed, or even shunned--they were just sort of shipped away) is in fact playing a pivotal role in not just a jailbreak, but in the final assault on the Cadre's stronghold. I love it when stuff like that fits together, and indeed, it's almost like my subconscious knew this was coming four days before I did.

At any rate, over 80% to goal, and about 40% of what I expect the final wordcount to be. I expect when I'm done getting the narrative down I'll be in the 75,000 range--and there are definitely enough sections I wish to add to in the story that 90,000-100,000 should be the final tally.

Ouch

So you may be wondering where I've gone (or, based on the hit count, you may not have been). Well, last Tuesday morning I woke up to a shooting pain in my right eye. I've had this before, but this was about as bad as ever; I drove to work with essentially septuple vision in that eye, and my vision didn't improve during the day. That evening, my eye started to feel like something was in it; by the next morning, it was red and swollen and hurt constantly, growing worse with each blink.

Well, several trips to the optometrist later, I can tell you that I suffer from recurring corneal erosions, which means that occasionally, part of the top layer of my cornea pulls off with my eyelid instead of remaining attached to the rest of the cornea. Which is about as fun as it sounds.

Of course, there are all sorts of fun things with that, as you may expect--when you feel like you've got something in your eye 100% of the time, it's hard to think two sentences down the line, much less plan out your novel. So I simply lay in pain for several days, letting myself get out of the flow of the story and allowing the inertia that had previously been my ally to become my foe.

Oh well. I can't get the time back, but I'm only about 6,000 words behind. That's not great, but a 2,300 word a day pace should get the job done. Considering my plan has always been to write 15,000-20,000 words over Thanksgiving weekend, 50,000 should still be very attainable.