Day 11 :

Day 12 :

Made some decent progress… cranked out a little over 1,000 words, and broke the 8,000 word mark. I had been hoping to break 10k by the end of the weekend, but… well… that didn’t happen.

Meeting the goal of 50,000 words by November 30 is looking less and less likely as time goes by. At this point I need to crank out about 2,300 words a day to meet target… and I’m not sure I have the time to pull it off.

On the plus side, I’m still feeling the story, and making forward progress. I’ll consider it a victory if I manage to keep my momentum going for the thirty days (and perhaps beyond). That motivation is what I’ve been lacking… and I hope to carry this momentum forward into other projects in the future (say, finishing a certain adventure I’ve had in the early stages for a couple of years… or writing that other novel I’ve had stalled for the past six years or so).

And who knows… I may find myself with a load of time and motivation to churn out two or three thousand words a day between now and two weeks from Thursday.

If you haven’t seen the latest posts to The Stars of Lochost, go on over and check them out. And please, leave comments or feedback. It’s one of the things that’s keeping me going.

Until next time…

It’s been a couple of days since my last update here… so here’s the daily progress.

Day 9:

It was a good day. I added nearly 1200 words to my total, and broke the 6,000 word mark.

Day 10:

Not as productive overall, and I just missed my target for the day — 7,000 words.

I’m still off pace, but I’m not feeling quite as bad as I did a few days ago. I haven’t really run into the fabled ‘second week slump’ — but perhaps that’s because I had a couple of days last week where I generated zero content.

As you can see from my “current total” over on the right there, I have actually broken 7,000 words… they just came after midnight, so they’re under Day 11. Ideally, I would like to break 10,000 words by the end of this weekend. I don’t have any real plans tomorrow (other than working from 7-3), so if I knuckle down I just might pull it off.

It’s late (and I’m up early tomorrow), so I’m not going to update the story blog right now. That can wait until tomorrow. Later!

Some more progress made… but I’m a little off-pace right now. The first week is done, and I was hoping to have broken the 10k word mark at this point. Instead, I’m barely over half that target.

On the plus side, I’m not struggling due to a lack of ideas… it’s the result of insufficient butt-in-chair. I have the next three or four scenes in mind… I just need to sit down and write them

Another entry has been made in the story blog, if you’re interested.

That’s all for now… sleep beckons.

Well… day four was a wash (as far as “officially registered word count) goes. I got some stuff written out longhand, but not more than a couple hundred words or so. Still, this afternoon has (thus far) been productive, typing up what I did yesterday and adding another twelve hundred words to my running total so far (and its only mid afternoon).

I’m going to take a little break… have some dinner… play some Earthdawn (it’s our Sunday night game). I hope to get a couple more pages cranked out before midnight tonight. We’ll see how that goes.

Stay tuned… more updates will be coming!

Not much progress made today. In fact… all 570 words of my progress today was made in the wee hours of the morning after my last post.

So I’m a little off the pace at the moment… chores to do, prep for our Mage LARP (which went well, thanks for asking)… it’s late, I have to work tomorrow, and I’m going to give the writing a pass for now.

I will be taking a notebook to work tomorrow to get some longhand work done. I know where I’m going next… I just need to find the time to get it down.

I have posted the next installment of the story over at my NaNo blog, if you’re interested.

That’s all for now!

A decent second day… I’m probably going to go for another hour or so, but since it’s close to midnight I thought I’d post an update and get the official “second day” tally down.

Because I didn’t upload my word count until early this morning, my progress report doesn’t have anything from day one… but a very respectable 2800+ words for day two. Slightly behind target, I guess, but still not bad.

I’ve slapped together a quick-and-simple blog for the story itself. You can find it here, under the working title “The Stars of Lochost.” This title may change as time goes by… but titles aren’t really important during NaNoWriMo, word count is! So I’m going to bring this post to an end and get back to work… twenty-seven days (and about 47,000 words) to go!

I’ve just finished my first day of NaNoWriMo. I had hoped to get all the way through the first scene of my book… but I didn’t quite do it. I got started a little bit later than I had planned this evening, and the scene is going to be a bit longer than I had thought (which is good, since I’m looking for word count.)

I was planning on posting the story as it grew, and I will, but not right now. As you can see from the time stamp, it’s late, and I need to get to bed. I don’t want to burn myself out too quickly, and I have hit my target for today.

That’s all for now… I have tomorrow and Friday off, and I’m hoping to get more words cranked out in that time.

Here’s hoping!

It’s late, I am beat, and I am turning in very shortly… but I had to come on and make a quick post. We had our Mage: The Awakening LARP tonight, and it went really well.

I have to say that, at the moment, I am in a total creative groove right now. I’m not sure what started it, but I’ve got a bunch of ideas and I’m itching to get at them. I haven’t felt this energized in a while… and tonight’s game helped push that further.

I’d like to thank everybody that came out for the game, and I hope that the next round of gamemasterly evil meets with your approval.

I spent a couple more hours cleaning my office last night… I very nearly have it back! All that’s left is to move the file folders with my organized bank statements, credit card bills, and the like to the file cabinets upstairs (instead of the living room floor space they currently occupy), shred a whole bunch of *old* documents, and I’ll be ready for the Great Culling.

It’s also two weeks to the beginning of NaNoWriMo. Ive been flopping back and forth between a couple of different ideas… and I should probably settle on one, so that I can do a little bit of planning and outlining before the month starts. Here are my rough ideas (in order of fleshiness):

* A cross-worlds story a la Chronicles of Narnia, but with a Shakespearean slant (basically, a troupe of actors steps into a real-life MacBeth/Hamlet/Lear scenario).
* A more traditional fantasy tale about a brother and sister divided by war, and their respective efforts to get back to each other.
* A novel set in the Earthdawn universe, with an eye toward publsihing it through RedBrick.

Regardless, I’m thinking about blogging the novel as I work on it… to help keep me honest.

One final thing… if you haven’t encountered it yet, check out Girl Genius by Phil and Kaja Foglio. It’s a great Victorian-era pulp steampunk romp. Add it to your “webcomics to read” list!

It’s been a long day. I spent most of it cleaning/organizing my office. I haven’t been able to use it for a couple of years, because rather than keep the space organized, I would just dump stuff in there with the intent of getting to it later.

Well, later finally arrived, and I spent this afternoon sorting and organizing old bank statements, credit card bills, and the like. Not exactly my idea of a good time, but I put my computer’s music playlist on shuffle and set to work.

Now, instead of a disorganized morass of papers, I have a dozen or so neatly organized file folders, and a grocery bag full of old stuff to be shredded. Now all I need to do is keep them that way, and I can use my office as an office again, instead of as a glorified storage closet.

This is part of the preparation for two things — NaNoWriMo in November and my plans for what I’ve been calling “The Great Culling”. You may have seen the pictures I posted of my RPG collection… well, there are a significant number of those books that I haven’t pulled off the shelf in years, and will probably never play. I also need some extra money, so I’m going to be going through the collection and sorting it into 3 categories:

(1) Things I need.
(2) Things I probably don’t need… but I really like them and don’t want to get rid of them just yet.
(3) Things I definately don’t need, and can dump to clear up shelf space and get a little extra money.

If you’re interested in acquiring any pieces from my collection, watch this space. When The Great Culling is done, I will post an announcement here, and accept offers. Anything on the list that doesn’t get snagged right off will go up on ebay to find a good home.

One final update — Mary had an appointment with her OB on Monday, and we had another set of utrasound pictures taken. This set was espectially cool, because they took the data from the ultrasound and rendered it out into a 3-D real-time image. Here’s a look at the “standard” ultrasound:

Here are some of the 3-D renders. The tech can set the ‘depth’ of the render at any point, and so you can get some different views. The first one is set at a “standard” depth — you can see the left arm and the outside of the head, but the features are obscured by the haze of amniotic fluid. The second is set a little deeper — the left arm is partly cut off (you can sort of see the left hand up against the head), and a little bit of the skin is removed from the abdomen, revealing the early formation of the ribs. The facial features (such as they are at this stage of development) are clearer, though.

In the third image, the depth is set down even further — we are actually ignoring the top of the skin and skull (in relation to how we’re looking, at any rate) and are looking at the developing brain. The kid is looking away from us, so we don’t get a look at his (or her) face.

This last one is the best of the lot, I think. Nice profile of the face, and a good view of the right hand.

That’s all for now! Stay tuned for further updates!