Writing my way to the stars!

Oh, I can taste the rainbow now. Been on a writing tear and am about to go back for more in just a bit so, tonight only, we're going to review early.

Really, not much to review today blog-wise, though. I installed few traffic monitoring doohickey's the other day (Yes, I am watching all you crazy people who come to my site. It's only because I'm more than a little insane myself, you understand.) and I'm still puzzling out just how they work. I might or might not talk more about them when I can actually get them to work. Although, if anyone out there has any tips for good monitoring programs for an extremely minor site then feel free to share.

As I said yesterday I am focusing laser-like on kicking out a coherent collection of 50,000 words by the end of the month so, honestly, haven't really bothered much to post. Oh, it's not like I don't have several ideas bouncing around in my head and I've made a few notes and sketched in a few so I won't forget them - it's just that any time I sit down to write these days I'm forcing myself to pour out more pages of my damn book. It's working so far as, although I haven't bothered to update my word count meter lately, I'm well underway and am just about to crack 20,000 words. If I'm lucky I might even get to halfway by the end of the night. Mostly, I've been blocking in the dialog. It's where I'm working out how the different communication formats - from message boards, to chatrooms, to telephones, and the like - affect the way my characters act and interact. It's also where I'm sticking most of my exposition and development, so once that's out of the way I can go back in and drop some descriptive paragraphs into things (I know, it's a weird way of doing things but, for me, writing how people talk and how things look takes two entirely different modes of thinking and trying to do both at once makes both suffer, especially if I'm writing at length. So, I skimp on one to keep my momentum going with the other. It works. For me, anyway. But the real trick is keeping things consistent.) and that should bloat my word count even further.

As things stand I'm less concerned I'm going to hit 50k as I am that I won't be finished with the story by that point. If what I have so far is any indication, I'm barely going to close out Chapter One (Which, admittedly, I'd planned out as the longest of my five outlined chapters not including a short prologue and "where are they now?" epilogue. It's the one where I need to lay out the world and the characters and set the stage for everything to come. That takes a bit of time. But it's also the chapter I've devoted the most time to and it's suffered from "feature creep" as I've gone along. So, I'm sure the others would get longer as well. Excuse me, but dammit! This was supposed to be a short little ditty I could carve out in a month, not a five volume psuedo-Tolkien wannabe epic.) by the time I've hit the magic number. If I'm lucky. Well, that's why I built any number of trapdoors into my plot structure so that I could pull the plug early and often, if needs and times must. So, I should have a real text by the end of the month, I just won't have told the entire story that I wanted to tell in the space I wanted. And while I could excise some things later on and work on closing things out, I'm not so certain I will without the driving brownsian motion of my fellow NaNoers behind me.

Eh, getting ahead of myself, really, as I think I'll concentrate on finishing my book first before worrying about what I'm going to do with it.

Outlook: I have ingested so much caffeine (or the non-union Mexican equivalent) that I am literally vibrating at this very moment. 50,000 or bust, manic depression here I come!

[1] - 15 again.