In Which I Disclose My Writing Progress Thus Far.

My word count currently stands at 22199: 44% complete. I'm significantly behind schedule, and have been for the past ten days. This bothers me a lot.

The nightly struggle is writing vs. sleep. The tricky part is that the less sleep I get, the slower I write. But the more sleep I get, the less time I have to write. So if I go to bed early (read: before midnight), my wordcount falls behind, but if I write an amount I'm satisfied with (read: 2000 words), I don't get enough sleep, and everything starts falling apart.

This wasn't as much of a problem last year because of differences in my schedule. Also, last year I had a roommate who would fix me dinner, chat with me while I ate it, and then say, "Well, I'd better let you get to writing" and pretty much leave me alone for the rest of the evening. That was AWESOME. But this year she's writing her own NaNo in faraway Chicagoland, so I have to fend for myself with the food and the washing-up and the telling myself it's time to write.

One thing that would definitely help is if I were more interested in my story. I love the concept, and my characters have tons of potential, but I can't figure out what to do with them. I just know I want it to be something really cool.

But that's part of my problem, I'm telling myself. It's really more important, in an endeavor like this, just to have them doing something, just to get things moving. Fellow Wrimo Sanguinity aptly described the work of the middle part of a novel as "racking up the tension and racking up the price." I keep repeating this to myself when I wonder what the heck to write next.

Last night, in the interest of said tension- and price-racking, I determined to write a scene in which things actually happen, dramatic things, things that neither I nor my characters had planned on. So I wrote a few lines in which my main character is woken in the middle of the night by someone else. Then I had to figure out why. Various scenarios came skulking into my head, and I picked the one that seemed most promising. I looked at my list of things that need to happen in this general part of the book, and picked a couple to work into the scene. I wrote what happened next, and tried to figure out what happened after that, and whether it would be more interesting for things to go wrong at point A or point B. I wrote a little more. I rearranged events in my head, envisioned some possible scenes, and kept going.

It was slow going, what with all the figuring-out parts. But by allowing my characters to make a mess, and then letting them decide how best to clean it up again, I did manage to get over 2000 action-packed words out of the evening. And yeah, it was after midnight when I quit, and yeah, I am tired today. But it's Friday, so that's okay.

Whew, so that was a lot of writing about writing. Hey, did you know that male mice court their mates with ultrasonic songs? It's true. You can read the story here. Even if you aren't interested in the research involved, you may want to listen to mp3 clips of a mouse love song shifted down four octaves or slowed down sixteen times. I especially like the latter. It's no Marvin Gaye, but it wouldn't sound out of place on a birdsong recording.

[Edit: corrected sloppy italics tags.]