Day 2 - 3987 at the stroke of midnight

It's only marginally better than that at the beginning of day 3 - 2.5 hours into it, I have 4497. According to my quota, I'm supposed to have had 7k words by 2.5 hours ago, and be up to 10.5k by the end of tomorrow.

Things aren't looking good so far, wordcount-wise.

On the other hand, the story itself is going pretty good. It has a completely different feel to it than the past two years. Temple and Amulet II were both sort of slapstick, while this one feels more serious. And more feminine as well. Which is probably unsurprising since the two characters with the most on-screen time so far are a mother and daughter.

They've left their house now after discussing their basic outlooks on life, and now they're travelling into the mountains to attend grandma's 80th birthday ceremony. They've stopped for the night at a village en route and will get there the next day.

At the moment I'm a bit stalled on what to do with their overnight stay. Nothing terribly plot-relevant happens in it. Mostly just lots of setting description to the tune of "this is what a typical village of the native folk looks like."

Once I figure out what to do with that scene though, and get it finished up, I should be into something more interesting. The introduction to Grandmother Yani'een, who is going to be chock full of revelations for the hitherto young, innocent, sheltered-life Janis.

More than the actual details, though, it feels like I'm actually playing within a consistent, complete Big Picture, and it's easy to immerse once I get started. My subconscious seems to have a plan, and I'm not doing too badly figuring out how to follow along, even without a whole lot of obvious signposts.

I just need to figure out how to do it faster and without getting distracted. Today did go better than yesterday. Yesterday I spent a lot of time obsessing over the fact that I had no food. So today I started my day by going out to get a bunch of Japanese takeout.

Also, I'm thinking that the lack of structure might have something to do with it too. That actually going to work and going through a few motions of doing work probably helps keep me on track. I need to cut down on my hours. But it's bad to completely eliminate them. Because for the past two days I've not had anything to do other than sleep and write, and I didn't really write that much. (But I did get all the monthly bills sorted out a week earlier than normal.)

There was also an extremely lengthy Making Light blog entry that had 700 comments in it, and I absolutely had to read the whole thing. It was about slush piles. I found it on Oct. 31. Talk about lousy timing. :p But I've read the whole thing now, so that's one less distraction from writing.

Tomorrow I'm thinking to get up in time for a 10am seminar at work. I might make it. I might not. But it'll give me an early start to the day with something scheduled, at least, and then I can stay there and get some paid work done while I'm at it, during the part of the day where I'm likely to be mostly sleep anyhow. And then skip out whenever I get bored with that.

I guess what I'm most afraid of at this point is not taking Nanowrimo seriously enough anymore. I don't want to be so calm about it that it turns into the same thing as every other writing challenge the rest of the year, where I only manage half-goal. But I'm just not working up the nervousness that I used to have.