National Novel Writing Month 2009 Progress Report

I'm fifteen days into NaNoWriMo, and doing terribly well.

Well, okay, sixteen days. I was going for the parallelism, though, so shut up!

I made a long post to my writing group's discussion board last week talking about goals -- specific, personal goals, and the impetus to reach them. The gist of it was that I had one: I wanted to finish Ghost Targets: Restraint (which I began back in June) by the 16th, when Julie and Carlos were coming by for a visit.

I did that. I actually finished the story last Friday afternoon, which put me at 29,000 words in November, and 55,000 words in the book. For those of you who are good at math (and know the rules of NaNoWriMo), you'll be wondering what I plan to do with my other 21,000 words in the next two weeks.

As of now, I'm undecided. In the last three days, I've written a couple pages of introduction for a totally new story idea (that's intended to be a collaborative project with Courtney), a couple pages of introduction for the next Ghost Targets book (which is currently laboring under the working title Shelter), and today, over lunch, four more pages that drive me a good distance into chapter one.

I'd spent the early part of the month thinking I was going to finish up my Sleeping Kings opener, Golden Age, and I'd still really like to do that. It's complicated, though. I was a different kind of writer when I wrote the SK books, and I don't think it would be worth the effort to rewrite the whole series to bring it more in line with my current writing style, but I don't know how well I can fake the old style to get a seamless introduction.

And, at the end of the day, I've got a lot more energy behind the Ghost Targets series now. I could end the month with a third of the fourth book done and soar past 50,000 for the month, and all of that would be pretty effortless. Or I could labor over every page, force out a passable introduction to Sleeping Kings, and barely hit my target even with all the extra effort. It would be awfully nice to have that done, but I don't know that I have the discipline or the motivation to make it happen.

Either way, I'm limping into my pre-class downtime today, so it'll be sometime Thursday before we know more. Well, before I know more. Chances are good this space won't be updated until the end of the month, though, and by then it'll be done, one way or another.

If you've got an opinion, feel free to cast your vote. Maybe you'll surprise me. Maybe you'll even motivate me.

Other than that, it's just things and stuff.