...I wrote 14,302 words today. My fingers hurt. I may quite well have developed carpal tunnel. But I finished the #%&@ novel.

Slightly over 2k of said words were at work, during lunch break and while I was waiting for my simluations to run. The other 12k were written at home, between the hours of seven and midnight. K did not let me watch basketball (the meanie) even though Maryland was playing Minnesota. He cooked dinner and all but fed it to me. At about 10:30, I found out I could type much faster if I didn't use capitals. At about 11, I stopped going back to fix spelling errors (I typed with my eyes closed). And thus I made the 50k wordcount, with ten whole minutes to spare before the deadline.

I owe K, and I owe [livejournal.com profile] melindaloquita for the silly cheering. And my deepest thanks to [livejournal.com profile] bkleber for being understanding when I stood him up for rock climbing, just so I could finish this piece of ridiculousness.

And now, to bed.
The migraine that I thought I had from last Monday through Wednesday was probably related to the sinus headache that it became on Thursday, which was promptly followed by a full-fledged cold on Friday and Saturday. Sunday and today have been days of sniffling, hacking, sinus-pressured recovery. Went to work today only to take the last two hours off sick, thinking I'd go home and sleep it off some... only to find myself staring wide-eyed and miserable at the ceiling, with occasional breaks for grabbing at kleenex. Figures.

Haven't been getting much writing done, either, save for last Saturday which was miraculously productive despite the head cold. If I can manage to get it together through Thanksgiving (I think from now till the end of the month that would be an average of 2575 words per day), I can make the word goal by the end of the month.

...or I could just take another Sudafed, pour myself a cup of hot tea, and curl up with A.S. Byatt.

Hmmm.

(edit: managed to forget about book club, which I would've been too sick to go to anyway. but miraculously the holiday party was chosen to be held on the day after K and I get back from our week in the midwest, so that was lucky. *wipes brow* all right, now I have to finish Byatt in order to start Ulysses...)
K went out drinking with his boys and I've been left alone for a good chunk of the evening: 2600 words typed out and saved. I'm definitely having fun this year. I've created characters with some interesting faults, which means I have plenty of ammunition for plot details. And I'm having much better success in keeping myself from doing any revising (last year's giant weakness). That's for December.

It's early days yet, though. We'll see how I'm doing in week 2. Besides, I might not have time in December to do any editing at all... cut for personal stressors )

Besides, I have over 9600 words to my credit so far, and they're even mildly coherent. So: booyah. :)

edit: 12:08AM and the boys are back; the kitchen is full of tall guys holding beers vodka sprites straight vodka (oh dear) and talking in cheerful loud voices. I will probably have to drive someone home. I think the writing is done for the night.
I attended the write-in at the Columbia Borders with a certain amount of guilt, since my laptop was K's only access to the internet (his computer's in pieces waiting for his room to get painted). Nice people there, all very supportive; very high nerd quotient (when you can start recommending anime series to one another after a bare five seconds of conversation, that says something about the crowd), not very many males. Most of the women were either mothers or students. Makes me wonder what the gender/age distribution of Nanowrimo participants in general, and how that might correlate to how willing they are to go out and meet new people over a cup of coffee.

Got over 2100 or so words out of the evening, and another punch on my Borders frequent coffeedrinker card. Also, the "Faces" magazine on the stand a few feet away from me had a cover with yellow print on top of a brown pattern; from a distance the two colors were unfortunately juxtaposed, because I swear it looked as if the magazine was named "Feces." I was inordinately amused.
There was a fire drill at work today; we all piled outside and admired the beautiful weather. S___e is in the middle of nowhere and it's absolutely gorgeous, no buildings in sight of my workplace, nothing but winding roads and autumn trees and gently rolling hills as far as the eye can see. The sky was blue and the sun was bright, and even the people who had come outside with clipboards and calculators were kicking back and chatting. A few people even started putting up the volleyball net. Sadly, they called us back inside before we could get a game going.

Anyway, it's the first day of Nanowrimo and I'm at 2156 words already, with a ghost of a plot in my head and a snarky character to play around with. Not bad, all told. (Probably helps that K's been in New York all day; I had all evening to bond with the laptop without distraction.) Props to [livejournal.com profile] dokein for finding Willie; it's an awesome freeware that does exactly what I need it to do: monitors my wordcount while allowing me to write in TextEdit. (Thank goodness for barebones word processors; u$oft Word is way too distracting.)

I think Nanowrimo is making me gregarious. It's a funny concept: for a month, participants take a very private exercise (writing) and make it into a very public enterprise. You make much of your writer's block, your plot consistency, your personal struggles; it's made more fun by the fact that tons of other people are doing it with you. No more writing in closed-off rooms; these people like to gather in coffee shops and hear about one another's characters. Turns the normal concept of writing on its head. Brilliant idea, really.

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