Holy cow, dudes!  I hit forty-five thousand words for NaNoWriMo today!  Gadzooks!  Call the papers!  Alert the military, or at least a comely lass with a penchant for reading horrid first drafts.  I’m deep into the home stretch on this bad boy, and it feels mighty good!  (For evidence of the feelings of mighty-good-ness, see the multiple exclamation-pointed sentences afore.)

During the past week’s period of time I’ve largely been doing writing in my free time and very little else, although I did find time to fit in a little fashion consulting to an elderly black gentleman at the thrift store yesterday.  I still think he should have taken home the Big Johnson Speed Shop T-shirt, but he opted for the Golf with a Weiner one.  Hey, I can only make suggestions.  I can’t help it if people don’t listen.

Yesterday was a sonic buzz of activity at Mo’Joe’s coffee house where I (kinda) buckled down with a bunch of other writers and (talked) wrote.  The last of my word smith comrades departed the land of caffeine and more caffeine at about 7pm, whereupon I took it upon myself to move to another table, pop in the ear buds, and write without stopping (much) until 11pm.  That last push got me another three thousand words added to the day’s total, bringing me to a grand total of 4K for the day, and an overall total of 38 thousand and some.  I’d wanted 40K by the end of the day, but that was plenty good to sleep on.

Today I was up early enough to get all my early morning journaling out of the way and be done with church and laundry and guitar practice by 12:45pm.  Without pausing to see if there was anything else that could possible allow me to procrastinate further, I threw my laptop in the bag, grabbed the Hohner 64 Chromatic, and headed for Monon Coffee Company with thoughts of getting absolutely as close to 50K as I possibly could.

Fifteen minutes later I sat before my laptop with an excellent hot green tea chai latte and fretted about where the hell to go next.  I fretted a bit more.  I sipped tea.  I fretted a bit more.

“If you type something, you’ll be writing,” I thought.  “You can figure out if it really makes sense later, but if you don’t friggin’ start writing, you’re not going to be writing.”

Faced with this rock-solid and irrefutable logic, I began.

Six hours and a cafe latte later I came up for air: 45 thousand and some couple hundred words.

In the past two days I’ve written over eleven thousand words.  My brain feels kinda squishy right now, but I’m okay.  I’m pretty happy.  If I wanted to take my time and finish on the 30th, I’d only need to do about 311 words a day for the remainder of the month.

The joke of this is, I’ve almost hit 50K and the story is just finally starting to take off.  It’s looking like it may take 100K (or more?) to help these kids figure out just what they’re doing in my story.  I…hope…I survive the experience.

Better go.  I’ve got some writing to do before bed.