day 25, session 1, 37544

Spent the morning doing a loose plot structure for the rest of the story.

Twenty-one scenes mapped out—even if I only write 500 words for each one of them, I’ll be on target.

Hoping I’ll get another session in today.

day 24,i mean day 23, 33930

Deficit finally below 5k. good.

Tomorrow should have him join the OSS. should hit training on Friday but… hard part over weekend. Istanbul. ugh.

I am realizing that the reason chapter four was so hard to write was because I made it too darn long. Four should mostly be split between three and five. Move five back to four. Six to five. seven is two chapter’s worth of materials – back in US; followed by OSS training and sending him to Istanbul.

Paris is wonderful but it’s really not four chapters! Not in this book at least. Also, needs more Normandy.

Everything needs more Normandy.

edited because i had marked this day 24. Not 23 [which is correct]

day 23, 31487 erm I mean day 22.

One of, if not the easiest, days of writing in this entire month.

And a scene I decided to write two days ago with a character that didn’t exist until about day five of the month.

Still, 2k words in about 45 minutes may be a record for me. This evening was so horribly rotten–took me two hours to get home–that I’m shocked I was able to decompress enough to write at all.

Of course, running always seems to burn out all of my anger. Maybe because my annoyance and hatred of running just overshadows everything else.

edited because i had marked this day 23. Not 22 [which is correct]

day 20, 26805

So unlike last year (but like this summer) I’m not writing weird sprints to pad my word count. It’s all story all the time.

Maybe I should change that.

Finally left Paris. almost in Orleans.

“A novel is a living thing” day 17, 24650

From the NaNoWriMo pep talk from Chris Cleave:

A novel is a living thing and it resists containment within the structures we erect for it. Even worse, the novel has intelligence and it will inevitably turn against its creator. Think of it like the velociraptors in Jurassic Park. The problem is that a good character in a novel will reach a point of maturity where he or she is not necessarily biddable.

What always keeps me going at certain points is when I myself no longer am sure what happens next. When the characters start to tell me things.

I used to love when this would happen when I was acting, on rare occasions. Like I would feel that sometimes, I would raise them, create them, materialize them, separate from me and the page and even the fusion of me and the page until there was almost this third thing, this ghost, that haunted the both of us. This universal character that existed apart from the two things that had made it flesh.

This is what I love most about the drafting process, that almost Dr. Frankenstein feeling of something lifted from disparate parts to a life of its own.

Except hopefully without the villagers, small child killing, and especially without the bolts. They just look painful.