THURSDAY NOVEMBER 12th, 2009 - NEWPORT


Another productive day (well, evening) - dove into Chapter V "Wasteland" and wrote about 4000 new words, which still fell a couple climactic passages short of finishing the chapter. "Wasteland" ends book one: "The Long Road Away From Home" and the next chapter will begin book two: "Ankharra."

This puts me officially over the half-way word quota of 25,000 - and one day ahead of schedule, no less.

The thing is, even though I've crossed the half way word count for National Novel Writing Month, I'm not sure if this really feels like the half-way point in the story - more like part one out of three - which would put my total word count closer to 70,000 then 50,000. I feel like "The Long Road Away From Home" is this wonderful set-up and it would be a shame to wrap it all up too quickly. Part of me wonders if this will become a whole trilogy, but that would be a LOT of work, and I don't want to get ahead of myself. So, 50,000 words for November, and then...

For such a productive day, it was remarkably angsty. I woke at 8, procrastinated for a couple hours, went to yoga, procrastinated for a couple more hours, drove 25 miles south to pick up some mail, and spent over an hour exploring the tide pools of Yachats (this was actually incredibly inspiring) and finally started writing around sunset, after a day of fruitless worry about whether I would ever finish the damn thing.

In other news, I started reading Carl Jung's autobiography "Memories, Dreams, Reflections" which I am already enthralled by, and which I hope will influence the rest of the novel as much as Ursula K Leguin's science fiction influenced the beginning.

To be perfectly honest, I have no idea what will happen in book 2: "Ankharra" except that it will involve Anka and her friends becoming lost (not just physically!) in a high tech 26th century city. So, good perhaps that I'll be hitting the road again and spending the next few days exploring the great cities of the Northwest, Portland and Seattle...

words written: 25,023
to be written: 24,977 (?)