Just reached 40,000 words.  I know I’m going to finish but at this point I don’t even care any more.  The work has gotten so stupid and boring at this point that I just want to finish it so I can start another novel – a real novel.  This one is just a play novel.  But I did actually physically write the entire thing in two weeks which pretty much amazes the shit out of me.

35,900 words.  I think I pushed through the wall because I saw the end of the story so I started writing towards the end of the story but now I’ve arrived there too quickly and I have to come up with 15,000 words after the climax of the story – the climax was a stupendously large storm that wiped out an entire city – the nine people that were all having trouble thinking of things to do in the city are now sitting on an island that has been wiped completely clean.

Due to various unusual things (about which I am too embarrassed to report) they cannot get off the island and no-one can get on.

So – basically – what happened yesterday is I wrote about 7,000 words about a storm that moved them from an island with a city in which they were bored to an island without a city on which they are bored.

I move on – forging ahead – I can see the end – only 15,000 words left – so that’s a much better thing than yesterday morning.

Day 7 of NaNoWriMo and I’m doing better today than yesterday.  I pushed through the big black void.  Not because I actually thought of anything for my characters to do but because I stopped caring if they had anything to do – it you can’t beat them join them.

At one point yesterday I had invented a character who’s great great grandfather had invented the bicycle.  I did this simply to allow me to explain why the entire group of my nine characters, all of whom had found beach rentals on the same block, were choosing to ride around the beach town they were in on bicycles.  I needed the bicycles because I had already had each of them walk around the beach town twice, and I was getting a little bored with all the walking.  I thought it would be interesting to have the bike instead of just walk.  It wasn’t.

But last night I decided to not worry about it and just push forward.  I’ve written about 5,000 words since then, but I am now at around 32,000 so I can sort of see a glimmer of the end.  If I ever choose to I can go back and re-write this entire thing – I just want to get to the end at this point.  You can be sure that bicycles will play a small part in draft 2.  And I’m pretty sure that the inventor of the bicycle will be nowhere to be found (I’m keeping him in the first draft so I can keep the word count high).

I will try to recount some more unfortunate choices I’ve made in tomorrow’s post.

I’m going to try to document, even if only for myself, what’s happening to me during this NaNoWriMo.  I’ve been writing for about three hours every day for the last week.  I started writing without any real plan about what was going to happen.  Now I am about half way through the process (word count wise) and I’ve come upon an unfortunate realization.  The realization is this – one should plan ahead when one writes a 10,000 word novelette let alone a 50,000 word novel.

I’ve completely lost the track of the story – as if there ever was one.  As I said yesterday, at one point in the story I had a guy sitting on a couch watching TV and he couldn’t think of anything to do with himself.  While I did accurately (and if I must say so myself, not inartfully) describe the guy’s pain I think I may have allowed the author’s feelings to come through a little bit too forcefully.

I gets worse….but I’ll wait to share that mess with you until tomorrow.

I started NaNoWriMo on November 2.  The idea is to write a 50,000 word novel (that’s about 175 pages – really a Novella).  One is supposed to write this novel over the 30 days of November.  I started writing on Nov 2nd (one day late).  As of today I have 20,495 words.  Almost half way through – but – today I wrote the following sentence:

“John sat there watching TV.  He couldn’t think of anything else to do.  He just sat there staring at the screen.  Think Think he thought.  He couldn’t think of anything.”

I’ve reached what I would call a huge – black – unimaginably dark empty void.  I literally cannot think of a single other thing for him to do.  At one point I had the guy riding a bike – and he couldn’t think of anywhere to go.

Oh my God.  What am I doing?