I WIIIIIIN!

NaNo's site reads my novel as only being 50,196 words - but I knew that would happen, so I wrote until I had 50,318 on OpenOffice, just to be sure.

But I WIIIIIIN! After cranking out, what, four thousand freaking words today?? Insanity. But I did it! And I think I actually covered all the ground I'd had planned out (aaand then some), so I'm really, really happy.

I feel like it might actually be somewhat readable in its current form, too, which is new. There are some bad rambling places, but overall... I am pretty darn happy. There are scene changes! There are people with personality! There is some less-than-painful dialog! wooo!

...and the book I mention in that last paragraph? Is the one with the flower-meaning lists that I've been consulting all along. :)



Yaaaaaaaaaay. That makes three wins out of six attempts - wooo for a 50% success rate! \0/

language and names

So in today's chunk, I had to fix the fact that I had the little girl saying "okay"! I know the origins of the word are pretty murky, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't in polite language use in the late 1800s, early 1900s, which is vaguely the time period I'm working in. Also: her mis-pronounciations started with a fortuitous typo, for which I am very grateful because it helped me give her a personality. She's adorable! I love her.

Thank goodness her name checked out. I was writing in the Starbucks on campus - no internet means I can churn out a day's worth of writing in like an hour. So when I went to invent names... I couldn't check my handy-dandy reference site. But, after a few minutes' thought, I realized I could narrow it down a bit anyway - noooo Biblical names for the kids. That was a nice break-through. The father, for as little as he wants to do with the kids, would definitely have put his foot down and refused to listen to Biblical names day-in and day-out around his house.

Evelyn popped into my head, I'm not entirely sure from where, but it was pretty - and, luckily for me, #125 in popularity in 1890. Not so high that it would be a common name, but high enough to be plausible. Her brother, I had a rougher time with, and subbed in Jared for a bit, but on checking the list, I found Avery, which I liked way better. Avery and Evelyn. The names sound really cute together. :)

...I had noooo idea what to name their dog, so I kept my eyes open while scrolling through the list. The name Rollie is somewhere in the top 500 for that year, and while I am totally unable to picture a kid surviving school with the name Rollie, I can totally see a couple little kids naming their dog that.

random actions

I love it when characters go running off and doing silly things for basically no reason. Yesterday, my main character suddenly felt terrified and ran away from the garden. Today, because a good song came up on her (i.e., my) iPod, she decided to take off for a sprint all around the garden, laughing and singing all the way. It's actually making me smile.


...when stuck writing, some people fall back on quoting books, or movies, or having characters sing "99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall". While I pride myself on never having gotten *quite* that desperate... my characters do tend to listen to music. A lot. This year's character has a music collector for a father, which means she has a good knowledge base lurking in her head. That paired with listening to music as I write (which I basically always do), means LOTS OF FREE WORDS WOOOOOO!

^~_~^

word count avalanche!

After work, I walked over to Tim Horton's. Got a soup'n'bagel combo with a hazelnut coffee. Sat down by an outlet, plugged in the laptop, and started writing.

I called it quits around midnight, because I could not write again until TUESDAY (11/9) and still be on top of things. I played Carmen Sandiago and crocheted until Tom picked me up at 1.

I freaking rocked the writing. I was the only NaNo'er there this evening, but that was fine too, I was able to zone in to my story and it was really, really nice. I even wrote a few sentences I was really, really impressed with! So, there's going to be a rather large chunk posted... I'm back-dating the time stamps since it was, technically, written on the 7th.