Royce's Random Thoughts

Today is looking like a washout. Thomas got up early and wanted to play on Daddy's laptop (he's on the PS3 right now) which means I couldn't start writing early like I usually did. So I'm cheating massively and adding in the 2,122 words I'd written into the story prior to the beginning of Nano and using them as an emergency buffer.

Happiness is waking up doubting you even want to bother writing,and then getting caught up in the scene and pounding out over 2k words,

Have not hit daily minimum today. Not sure I'm going to be able to, thanks to exhaustion brought on by a nasty cold and Tom having a major meltdown this afternoon mostly from the time change. Blah.

Running behind again, mostly from waking up "late" at 4am. I'm definitely going to have to play catch up this weekend, children willing

Alex has a talk with her dad about her future job prospects and then heads back home to China.

Daily Word Count: 1794

The lunches are made, the PS3 is off, the laptop is charged, and I have nothing to do at this point but write (and waste time making LJ entries).

Starting Word Count: 2122
Goal: 52122

Here we goooooo...

Family: We took Georgia out to the Chuck E. Cheeze in Frederick for a meet up with three other families that adopted from the same orphanage. She had a blast and Thomas was reasonably well behaved. Though I am coming to the conclusion that the Chinese government tends to, ahem, shade the truth a tad when they're matching orphans to families. I thought it was a rather amazing coincidence when Georgia just happened to have the same birthday as me, and thought she was rather big for her age when we got her. This pales however, to the one young lady who was adopted at the tender age of twelve last year, and looks a whole lot more like sixteen. Her parents aren't complaining, and it actually doe help her with cathing up in school, but it was still a rotten thing to do.

Oh, and when did Chuckie's get rid of the creepy animatronic performers? I missed 'em.


Nano: I've still got a chapter or so to write on this story, but I'm burned out from my big push towards the end, so I'm letting it lie for a bit. Looking back what I've written, I can see I basically chopped out a big section of what should have been Nafir training at the Council Island and bonding with Shaffa and Chizoba. I could easily add at least a third to the book in that section alone. Meanwhile, while the primary crisis is resolved the plot certainly isn't. There's an investigation to be had to find The Man behind Lord Gacheru, Shaffa's Mysterious PAst (tm) to be relvealed, and maybe this time around I should actually think of the plot if that tale before I start writing.

Assuming extensive third degree burns around one's throat, would there by a chance of damage around the victim's voicebox, or should they be more worried about their blood literally boiling in their carotid(sp) artery?

Why yes, this is related to my nano...

Words written: 40,771. Words to go 9,229. Hit the magic 40k mark. Go me.


Woke up feeling tired and unmotivated and barely managed to get a bit over five hundred words in this morning. Tonight I had to go to Thomas' parent/teacher conference, which was a little rough but generally positive. I'm calling it quits for today. It's the first time I haven't hit the daily word minimum, but I'm not going to worry about it too much. I only missed it by about three hundred words, and if I can keep up the pace I'll hit goal by the 27th.

Life: The turned the heat on at work this week, so just my toes are freezing off and I don't have to wear my coat inside. Seriously, it was a frigging freezing in there, to the point my hands were feeling arthritic. Otherwise not much happened.

Nano: Has been pushing along nicely. As of today I'm about 5 words short of the halfway mark, and I'm about three days ahead of schedule going by the nano calculator. I'm fairly impressed with myself. I don't think I've ever put this many words in such a short time. I've consistently finished at least above the minimum, though I haven't managed anything like my first day when I put in almost 2500 words. Only downside is that at least during the work week I don't really have time to play any games on the computer. If I can manage a slower pace after NanoWriMo is over, maybe 500 to 1000 words today, I've got confidence that I can actually complete an original novel in a reasonable amount of time.

Now if I could just format it correctly and find an agent...

It helps that I finally figured out what my very vaguely thought out plot macguffin was going to be, thanks to some brainstorming on the part of the sjgames.com forum when I entered a technical question. Hurrah for steam geeks. :)