Not Quite An All-Nighter
Thu 2005-11-10 01:00:53 (in context)
- 10,115 words (if poetry, lines) long
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!