Hey fan base! I’ve been busy, but not too busy (in other words, no all-nighters). Here’s my progress so far:

Once they get their system set for a few hundred thousand users, NaNoWriMo does a great job of keeping track of how much I’ve written. That graph on the right is just what I need to force myself past the moments of thinking I’ve made a huge mistake. As long as that brown bar stays above the grey line, I know I’m on track.

There are plenty of moments when I think perhaps this writing gig is too much like work, but I’ve learned to ignore them. NaNo provides advice from pep-talkers like Tamora Pierce (she suggests making your protagonist do something stupid to see how they cope), and several dozen discussion forums with writing prompts such as this one from “Pachelbel”:

Imagine your character going about his or her mundane daily tasks and finding something unexpected that brings about a strong reaction. It must be a physical object that creates either a physical or mental threat, or a mystery, whether real or imagined.

Pachelbel has another 200 or so of these suggestions, enough for 6 per day if needed. NaNo is about discovering your story and who your characters are, so everything is acceptable, even if later it gets edited out.

Anyway, I’ve passed the halfway point, so I encourage myself by saying the rest is a downhill ride. Yet halfway isn’t all the way, I have two big scenes coming up, including the obligatory battle between the goodies and the baddies, and I know that days of grinding away with no idea of where I’m going are still ahead of me. And then I get to edit it into a novel!

Meanwhile, I’ve been reading: 5 Mapp & Lucia books (including 4 not written by E. F. Benson!), a bit of Thurber, Augustus Carp, more Thurber, and now Diary of a Nobody.