NaNoWriMo started today, and I'm happy to announce that I've already written 886 words in my first session :)

It took me an hour and a half, which is a bit slow - but then my husband was pottering around the living room and my cat decided she wanted to go to sleep inside my dressing-gown because it was cold!

Got off to a steady start, averaging a little over 2000 words per day, @ ~680 words per hour. Not spectacular, but I'm trying to balance quantity and quality - no point writing complete garbage!

Slowing down a bit - all those sleepless nights of anticipation in late October have caught up with me! Since I'm on target for 50k, I think I'm going to take the evening off and recharge my batteries ready for this weekend's Forward Motion word-count marathon!

I finally got around to pasting my Alphasmart documents into a word-processor this morning, and got a nasty surprise! First, I seemed to have lost about 40% of my word-count, which I eventually traced to a syncing problem - new files were being added to my Wordsmith folder but existing ones had not been updated. However even after retrieving the missing paragraphs, Wordsmith has turned out to be extremely optimistic in its wordcounts, to the point of over-estimating them by nearly 9%! Hence I'm now slightly below my 3-day target instead of comfortably over :(

Oh well, forewarned is forearmed - I shall be aiming for 5500 words on the Alphasmart this weekend, which should translate into a shade over 5000 on my laptop.

Technology - don't you just love it?

Managed to clock up a good total today after all, despite needing a big midday nap to finish catching up on sleep. A big banquet scene with people making speeches helped :)

Had a pretty good day today - didn't spend as long writing as yesterday, as I had other things to do (like mucking out the chickens and tending a neglected allotment!), but still pretty productive. Most importantly, I nudged over the 10k mark, so I'm on target to finish on the 25th (or write 60k - which would be great!).

I also helped out Rebecca, my fellow CWIL member and NaNoWriMo participant. She has a lot of extra work on at the moment, which is eating into her weekday evenings, so we held an informal write-in here at my place and both managed to make good progress. We celebrated with a G&T and an episode of Buffy :)

I'm afraid I've been too busy either working, writing or resting my weary brain and fingers to keep up with all my word-count updates. The early part of the week was very sluggish, probably because I knew I had a big scene coming up and was itching to skip ahead!

I finally wrote it the day before yesterday (murder - yay!), and last night did 1500 words of reaction scene after getting home from my writers' group meeting, so I'm feeling pretty good despite being 500-odd words behind target.

TGIF - I should be able to pull ahead again at the weekend :)

Broke the 20k barrier today! Time really flies when you're having fun - especially if your characters aren't! Writing everyone's reactions to the murder, and their attempts to cope with the mess that's been made of their lives, has definitely been the best bit so far :)

Broke the 25k barrier on the 15th, bang on schedule, but my triumph was short-lived. Yesterday was the first day ever that I wrote not a single word...

Still plugging away! The writing is still pretty difficult at times, I have to admit. Having an outline may mean you're never at a loss as to what to write, but summoning the enthusiasm to write a scene when you already know what's going to happen can really hard. I have to say it's worth it, though, because sometimes new ideas occur to me whilst writing which are better than the original outline. They don't have to be outrageous enough to substantially alter the plot - in fact I'd rather they weren't! - but they can add a new twist or spice up a dull scene, which is never a bad thing.

For example, as a result of an on-the-fly twist in my latest problem scene, I had a really productive day (for a weekday) - 2806 words, taking me up to 36179, which is nearly 1200 ahead of schedule!

I broke the 40k barrier at 7am this morning, which was a great relief. It was an easy 800 words, though - a frantic chase through the woods, which kept my fingers moving almost as fast as my hero's feet :)

The story's still moving along, but there have been some more seat-of-the-pants inspirations that have serious implications for the plot. Like the real villain not being who I'd planned it to be, for one! The next few scenes are going to need some serious rethinking...

Aaargh!! My six-month old MacBook has started exhibiting "sudden shutdown syndrome"! I've done the recommended resets (and I reinstalled Tiger only a week ago), but given that my machine is in the affected serial number range, I have a nasty feeling it'll have to go in for repair :(

Thankfully NaNoWriMo is almost over and I've still got 95% of my data backed up from the last reinstall, so when I've finished and verified my word count, I'll be on to Apple to get this baby fixed. It's also a good excuse to get my old iBook up and running again...

I think my subconscious is plotting behind my back! Cue the theme to The Twilight Zone...

Just before midnight last night, I crawled across the NaNoWriMo finish line - 4 days early! My current word count is 50,107 :D