Week 2 of NaNoWriMo

Hello again everyone. Today finds us at the start of Week 2 of NaNoWriMo, and I have already failed in my initiative to reduce my caffeine consumption. I already have two Diet Cokes and half a pot of coffee down, and it's only mid-afternoon.

How's the writing, you may ask? Well....Let's see. Other than one night where I banged my head repeatedly upon my desk trying to get the words to come out, it's going fairly well. I started off strong, whipping through the first to word checkpoints trending well above the daily expected rate. And then I hit the wall. And what a wall it was. An entire day of being unable to put words to paper (or keytaps to screen, whichever you prefer). Desperately seeking a way to overcome this obstacle, I did what any normal writer would do - I sat on my ass, put in a Star Wars video, and had a beer. Problem solved!

Unfortunately, I work nights on the weekends, and they're long shifts, so I don't write when work those days. So Saturday afternoon through Tuesday afternoon was a lost cause, leaving me 4000 words in the hole from where I should have been by Tuesday night.

Last night was an excellent night for writing, as I felt refreshed and invigorated with the promise of four straight nights of writing for hours on end. And I had another beer! At least it wasn't more caffeine.

Either way, the words flowed out of my warped mind like water flushing down a toilet (an apt analogy at this stage in the writing process). Three thousand words later, I called it a night and headed for bed. Interesting thing about writing so intensely is that I started to dream about what to write today. So here I am, downing caffeine like I'm addicted to it (oh wait, I AM addicted to it!), and bumping up that word count with some interesting out-of-nowhere scene snippets that have me scratching my head at how this plays into the novel.

To give you an idea of what's going on, somehow Apxlus finds himself back at the mouth of the city tunnels on Shalotha (hadn't written about these yet). He enters, seeking something (he hasn't told me what yet). Anyway, some odd things are going on in the tunnels. The most startling point - my very first sentence of the scene started like this:

The warrior turned politician stood before the large opening in the mountain, staring back at him much like the gaping mouth of an overly large predator.

Now, once you read the first novel, you may think it's Radael, but this turned out to be Apxlus. Well, Whiskey-Tango-Foxtrot, why is Apxlus a 'warrior turned politician'??? What the heck happened to him from the end of the first novel up until this scene? Yeah, I don't know. That part of the story hasn't been written yet, and none of this is in my memorized story outline (ok, so I don't really have an outline - just a vague idea that I need to type a story). Confusing to me, yet I guess I can see where this may happen. Without spoiling part of first novel, since it' hasn't come out yet, I can't really explain to you why I think this is happening. But I have an idea, and after the first novel comes out, I'll put some thoughts into a future blog as to why the story is taking this turn.

Anyway, it's back to writing the story. But first, off to get propane so I can grill some brain-food for today's writing session. A little hamburger with some Canadian Steak rub from Sam's Club - mmm mmm good!

Good luck to those of you who are feverishly writing as well. See you in the next blog posting...