I can’t believe that it’s already the halfway mark of National Novel Writing Month.  While I’m not yet caught up on my words, as you can see from the image below it’s going much better than it did when I had made my last update.

For the past few days I’ve been managing a daily word count of over two thousand words and I’m catching up.  At the moment I’m wrapping up the climax of the first act of my novel after which I’ll have to do a spot of planning again to incorporate the new ideas that have popped into my head while writing the first twenty-two thousand, which will include coming up with names for a couple of new supporting characters, but I don’t foresee any major problems and I hope to be caught up and maybe even ahead by Friday.  (By the way, that’s one horrible run-on sentence I wrote there, isn’t it?  I hope none of them have made it into the novel thus far.)

I’m really enjoying the journey.  There are days (like today) where I have to force myself to go and write and there are others where the story just takes off.  My characters have already surprised me, like when my protagonist revealed that she was secretly in love with her best frien.  I honestly did not know that until she said it.  It was weird.  If you’ve been following my Twitter feed you’ll also know that I’ve had more than one good cry with my characters these past two weeks.  Writing a novel might be bloody hard work, but it’s way cheaper than therapy.

Talking about Twitter, I finally reached 50 followers.  That only took me a year.  I should really take the time one these days to find out how Twitter actually works.  That might help.  (If you scroll down to the bottom there’s a Twitter widget.  You can follow me without even leaving this page, so you have no excuse.  Same goes for the Facebook page.)

Talking about stuff that take a year, it’s been a quiet day in the house by the open sewage channel we call a river.  This weekend we’ve finally had some rain – the first proper rain in two seasons, so it was very pleasant.  Apparently rain works for writing, as my word count these past two days have been higher than on any day yet during NaNoWriMo.  Today the rain was gone and so, for a while, the words.  Luckily they seem to have come back after a bit of targeted procrastination and I should hit 23k (perhaps more) before bedtime tonight.

The wife has finally finished Terry Brooks’s Elfstones of Shannara.  She’d been working on it since before the Olympics last year.  Now she’s reading a Mills & Boon.  I didn’t even know we had any of those in the house.  I only found out about this after I had said the ’till death do us part’ bit, the wily minx.  (On second thought, I should have known – she’s also a Twilight–fan.)

I’m not reading very much at present.  I’ve put aside Lauren Beukes’s The Shining Girls until NaNo’s over, as it demands a fair bit of concentration.  I have instead been familiarising myself with the world of Harry Dresden.  Yes, I finally found a bookshop that has heard of Jim Butcher.  Unfortunately they didn’t have the first one in the series and my obsessive-compulsive tendencies don’t allow me to start reading a series on the second or third book, and I was about to walk away, taking it as a sign from the universe, when I spotted Side Jobs, a collection of Dresden short stories.  (Another of those run-on sentences.  I really need to start paying attention to those…)

These short stories are perfect for my writing schedule as they can fit nicely between writing sessions.  I’m almost finished, so start looking forward to a review this coming Friday.

Well, that’s all from me for now.  I have to go rescue an eight-year-old from evil elves who have been torturing him for fun.  Not sure exactly how it’s going to go yet, but you can be certain they’re gonna be sorry when his big sister shows up.

Have a great week.

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