author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

No, not me. I ain't quitting. No sir. I didn't do a full 2K today, but I did this much:

A daily word count of 1,667 would have put you at 36674 words.
You have averaged 1600.227 words per day thus far.
A daily average of 1859.375 will make you a winner!
Good luck!

But not everyone "wins" NaNoWriMo. And that's OK. From talking to at least two people today who started the challenge and then stopped, here are two reasons to give up on the idea of a single 50K work written in 30 days:

• When you're no longer interested in the story. One person I know started an entirely new novel during Week 2, and now has given up on that story too. But she still comes to write-ins and does stuff like freewriting and brainstorming. Sometimes a given story just dies, or needs to be put on the shelf for awhile. Pushing past the point of authorial interest will only guarantee an uninterested reader.
• When you're no longer interested in writing. Some people take on NaNoWriMo, having never written much before, with the intent to discover whether they have a book in them. Sometimes they discover that no, they don't. At that point, it's probably best to stop writing and move on to something one would prefer to spend time on. Because, heck, life's too short to spend on something you don't fundamentally enjoy. Granted, writing isn't always playtime, even for the most inspired writer in the world. It'll be work from time to time too. But if the work isn't fulfulling, move on to something else. Don't turn your daily word quotas into a penance undertaken for the sin of not coming out of NaNoWriMo a lifelong career writer.

Moving back into my own NaNoWriMo 2005 experience: I did a bit of kvetching today about how Right Off The Page is the second book in a series whose first book isn't written. Kandybar's response was a sort of "Oh, I hate it when that happens, I've totally done that." My husband, on the other hand, said, "You're an idiot!" He's very sweet and wants to see me get published, and he knows that if I'm banking on this series then I'll have to publish The Bookwyrm's Hoard first.

He also knows that means one more book for me to write before I'll finally get back to work on "the ghost story." This refers to an as-yet unnamed novel which began as a short story roughly inspired by thinking too much about Tori Amos's song "Toast." That alleged short story refused to show signs of ending after 2,000 words. (At this point I had Stern Words with my Muse about false advertising. "Oops," she said, "did I say short story? Maybe I, er, underestimated." She means lied.) John would like very much to read it, but only those 2,000 words exist as of yet. He would like more of it to exist, please, and as soon as possible.

It's times like this when I thank the Gods for supportive husbands. Some writers have spouses that say, "That's nice, dear, but when are you getting a real job?" or "What do you mean, you're busy? You're only writing." I have a spouse that says, "Is it finished yet? Can I read it? What do you mean, no?"

(He would also like me to be the next J. K. Rowling so he can retire on my book advances. Well, so would I.)

It's nearly Thanksgiving. I have thanks to give. This is not the only reason, but it's a big one.

Chapter nineteen is halfway done. Mickey's first victim is in the hospital recovering from having been sucked into Brooke's plot. Brooke has just finished recapping how her date went up to that point, and exactly what happened when Mickey showed up. I think, plotwise, I'm in the first scene of Act Three.

I meant just to do about 2,000 words today, but the whole getting shot in Central Park thing was kind of exciting to write about, so I just kept going. Now, my calculator tells me, I've averaged about 1,586 words a day and will need to meet a daily quota of 1,854 words going forward. The numbers just get better and better!

Except, of course, having written to the end of my steam tonight, I'm not sure where I'm going tomorrow. I suppose something to do with Gwen's realization that even if she herself isn't involved with Brooke, someone will be, because that's how the plot goes, and Mickey will try to kill that someone, because that's how the plot goes. And that if he succeeds in killing someone from Real Life things will be Bad. And that the only way to solve things is to put everyone back in the book regardless of how unfair that is.

I want this book to address deep philosophical concerns, such as how Gwen has victimized her antagonist by making him too two-dimensional, and how characters can't be spared but they can be treated like real people rather than like constructs, and how writers maybe fall prey to the temptation to treat real life people as characters who can be manipulated for the author's convenience... but right now I'll be pleased just to get all the plot down.

Meh. Grandiose philosophical themes are a second draft matter. Time to inject lit crit goodness during the rewrite.

First off: It's getting to be Fruitcake Season. Time to go shopping for dried fruits and nuts and liquor. I'm thinking rum this year. Nice dark rum. Solistice is said to be December 21st this year, so I'm telling everyone that our open house vigil with Yule log and dawn carpool/caravan to Red Rocks for Drumming Up The Sun will be Tuesday the 20th.

Second: My recommended daily word quota starting Monday (today) is 1989.

Third: My characters are wallowing. None of them are communicating with each other, and they're all bloody miserable. I think I really shall send in the ninjas. Actually, what I'm sending in is the escaped antagonist who's after Brooke. Nothing like actual assault and battery to liven up an emotional melodrama. "Hey you! You pathetic people! Here's a catalyst--now act on it!"

And that's all for now. More in 2,000 words. No, I mean it this time.

Quoth my handy-dandy NaNoWriMo Calculator on Saturday, November 19:

For Reference:
A 1667-word daily average would result in a total of 31673 by the end of day 19.

Your Stats:
Your daily average thus far is 1469 per day over 19 days.
At this rate, you'll wind up with 44070 words.

In order to win...
You need to average 2008 words per day over the remaining 11 days.

Good luck!

(It used to say I needed to average 2,089 words, going forward. So I figured I had to write more than 2,089 words to make things better. In case there's any confusion, 27,913 minus 24,585 is rather more than 2,089.)

Plus Gwen got to meet the talemouse. That was cool. Apparently, a talemouse's natural voice is like a dog whistle that humans can hear, and it's kind of like fingernails on a blackboard, and Gwen now has a super colossal headache.

I got to visit with quite a few fellow Boulder-area NaNoers at the Tea Spot today. Tea was duly sipped. Dim sum was summarily consumed. And words got written in great quantity. In my case, I'm fairly confident of the quality as well. Rewriting this bad boy, I think, won't be nearly as painful as rewriting other novels has been.

Tomorrow's 2000+ words will involve... well, I'm not entirely sure what they'll involve. I'll have to give it some thought while I double-knit 11" of ribbing and 11" of ribbing-with-stockinette-panel. By this time tomorrow, I'll know more than I know now, and will hopefully be ready to mail off a wedding present to the New Orleans area too. Or at least I'll be a lot closer to ready.

Ye Gods. Between the book-as-other-world motif and the love triangles that seem to sprout up faster than I can justify them, this novel is practically turning into Fushigi Yugi.

I mean, really. Just about everyone seems to be motivated by jealousy over someone else, with one exception, and she's having existential crises worthy of an anime clone girl. Ye Frickin' Gods.

At times like these, I can see why NaNoWriMo participants are urged to send in the ninjas.

Yeehah! About a thousand words yesterday, almost three thousand today; I might actually finish this thing on time!

So Gwen and her husband Tim are babysitting the wayward fictional Brooke at the bookstore knows as The Bookwyrm's Horde (which, by the way, will be the title of the novel that precedes this one in the series). Tim runs the store in the mornings and Gwen in the afternoons. Meanwhile Brooke is just hanging out. We have discovered some things about interfictional cosmology (and when I say "we" I am not being coy and meaning "the reader"; I mean "I just discovered this stuff today, isn't it cool?"), such as...

• Brooke can't read any "sibling" fictions--books written by people who call the same place Gwen does "the real world." The words become intelligible to her.
• This is not a contradiction with Brooke having read the manuscript of the novel Gwen wrote. Brooke is in that novel. She can read it just fine.
• Fictional characters who have travelled to their author's "real world" are going to want to steer very clear of the Bookwyrm's Horde, or at least the actual shelves. They do not want to meet the Bookwyrm.
• The Bookwyrm's lair looks very different to an author than it does to a talemouse. For one thing, it's not nearly as scary.
• The Bookwyrm cannot tell stories. It can only collect them.

The manifesto obliges me to post every day, and to keep my post relatively centered around writing. Sunday's goth club outing¹ is not a valid subject for blogging, nor is the delightful Celtic Tatting book² Sarah got me. Ditto the wedding present³ I am frantically knitting for my friend and his bride-to-be.

So here's a very boring post to say, "Hey, look! I got a whole bunch of words written since last post!" In case you care, we're up to Chapter Thirteen, in which the talemouse meets the Bookwyrm. In my own opinion, which isn't very humble because in first draft stage my opinion is all that matters, it was pretty darn cool. I got to describe how Rakash Sketterkin finds his way into the Bookwyrm's lair, and to define the true nature of the Bookwyrm's horde (the actual horde, not the bookstore named after it). To describe and define those things, I had to decide and discover them. Yay NaNoWriMo! Daily word count quotas are good for me.

Now, I need to figure out why fictional characters don't want to go anywhere near the Bookwyrm. At least, not in their parent plotlines. The Wyrm probably wouldn't threaten their existence in their own plotlines.

In other news, the battery in my Ancient Decrepit Compaq Contura Aero appears to have joined the ranks of the undead. Or the resurrected, I'm not sure which. The computer has been running on battery power for 30 minutes without showing a drop in the battery charge meter, which is a huge improvement over last week's "pull out the plug and the computer immediately dies" routine. Yay zombie battery! Maybe next time I lend Willow my Averetec, I'll actually be able to use the Compaq on battery power.

And that's all.

(1. I'm sorry, I have no pictures to share of me gothed up and dancing to a slightly sped-up spin of VNVNation's "Neverending Light". Nor have I pictures of John, Sarah, or Jaerin, at least not such that I'm at liberty to share. Nor have I sustained actual bruises from the collision occasioned by two stoned dimwits who started rolling around on the floor and using us as pinball bumpers.)

(2. Dude! I had been trying to figure out how to do celtic knotworks all weekend! Apparently the answer is to tat chains, not loops, and use a paperclip to thread the chains into knots. Very cool.)

(3. The wedding is on December 3rd. If I knit really fast, there's hope. If I knit really fast and stop swapping threads or either notice more quickly when I've swapped threads or just give up on this whole "knit two socks at once" idea.)

So, I did about 2,000 words yesterday. I plan to do another 2,000 words today. But I'm having one of those "Who the hell cares about my petty concerns?" days, ever since hearing that they're pulling the plug on SciFiction. Damn it. Without my ever managing to sell Ellen Datlow a story for it. Double damn.

You should go there, now, and read the voluminous archives of short fiction. I think it'll be on display until the new year; after that, all bets are probably off. Today I read the latest original story on it ("Man For The Job," by Robert Reed) and over the next few weeks I'll read the archives in backwards order, one story at a time. Such a wealth of fiction should not go to waste. I hope someone (Ellen Datlow maybe?) will anthologize it.

So, yeah. Huge, huge bummer.

Talk to you in another 2,000 words, I suppose.

I've already lost track. When was it? Thursday? Thursday the Tenth. Right. No writing happened on Thursday, November the Tenth. It's a little misleading if you look at the Daily Word Count bar graph displayed on my NaNoWriMo profile; I suppose I must have roused myself long enough to actually update my word count. (As for the lack of bars on the Sixth and the Seventh, that had to do with being reeeally busy and then being on a train. I wrote, but I didn't get online to update my official word count.)

So what's up with that? Well, it had to do with going grocery shopping, making cat food, reducing the bedroom to its primal state of carpet and bare walls in order to clean really thoroughly, a surprise visit to Saturn of Longmont (my car didn't start the night before--surpirse!), and, so I'm told, a plume of toxic vapor over IBM. By the time I finally collapsed (from exhaustion, not from vaporized epoxy), it was in search of unconsciousness.

Which is a long way of saying that 2,000 words a day, which was at first a pleasant option to consider, is now a necessity. So it's a good damn thing I did just about that today.

Meanwhile, the story progresses. The characters keep doing things that surprise me. The chapter in which Gwen explains things to Brooke ("By the way? You're imaginary. I made you up") was not intended to have a mutual crying jag in the middle of it, but conversations between fictional characters will turn in strange ways. Also, that sex scene in chapter nine? It went and developed Serious Foreshadowing right there at the end. Yeah. Not expected.

That kind of stuff, characters doing stuff I hadn't planned on, saying things that have Themish and Metaphorical implications--it makes me fall in love with writing all over again.

*Bliss*

This to be said about IHOP's pumpkin pancakes: They go best with butter pecan syrup.

John and I pooped out of the IHOP All-Nighter at around midnight-thirty. I was tired, and he was getting bored. We're both hitting Week 2 with a vengence. Week 2 is when the novel stops being fun, see. I think I'm digging a few holes through that wall, though. Slowly but surely. Taking a spoon to the mortar and sccrrraaaaaaping awayyyyyyy.

The thing about all that scraping is, odd fragments of things show up amid the mortar crumbs. Paradoxically, I have to make up fresh details in order to give my talemouse an ambiguity to chew through. How does he get Brooke out of her own timeline and into Gwen's? He gnaws a hole where a little yellow flower grows in the park, just something that Gwen put there for color but didn't bother to identify or describe or even think about. And Brooke fell into the hole. How does he keep tabs on Brooke once Gwen finds her in Central Park? He rides in the skin of a bit-part character, a jogger I threw into the scene to keep Brooke and Gwen from turning into talking heads. Just something to distract Brooke for a moment, a jogger running by. Unnamed, unimagined, it gives Rakash Sketterkin a way in.

So there's a jogger that wasn't there before, and a yellow flower that I had to go back and add, just so I could say that the story was vague about the jogger or the flower.

I keep referring to the failure of "Gwen's author"--me--to imagine things properly, or to the fact that "Gwen's author" has never seen New York. Which sort of makes me a character in this book. If it's a Mary Sue thing, it's the oddest Mary Sue I ever did see.

Today's leap in word count is partially due to Greywolf--that's the New Orleans Municipal Liaison--inviting me into her daily NaNoChat, where participants participated in 15-minute word sprints. I got something like 228 and 336 words in those two races, words I think I can be proud of. Then another 800 or so at the IHOP later in the evening, followed by 300ish in bed just now. Today was a good day.

Tomorrow, well, who knows. Tomorrow will be full of laundry, house-cleaning, cat food making, and car repair. The car died on us today. I think its alternator went wherever it is that the dogs go at the end of a convention. You know. During the dead dog party.

With any luck I might still be able to, on top of everything, attend another write-in. Wish me luck!