Mac Mode

Current Word Count:
26,564 / 50,000

I guess I’m rustier than I thought. This book I’m working on is interesting, it isn’t the content, it’s my drive to get my buns in the chair, in front of the PC, and get writing.

Well, now I’m better than halfway to the 50k but this last week hasn’t gone well from a progress on word count perspective. I didn’t even talk about my progress on the radio show I host yesterday as was planned. I guess it must have been my subconcious mind telling me how much I sucked for falling off the pace and not writing every day, as I had hoped. I set myself up for disappointment though by my preconceived notion that week #3 was going to be the hardest week for me. Big surprise: it has been!

But then I saw some encouraging words in the comments last night from Matt, a fellow NaNoWriMo:

And I read your excerpts, and I must say your novel idea sounds fascinating… will you ever post some longer excerpts for us to read? You’ve written tens of thousands of words… can’t you give us the first couple thousand?

Matt, firstly thank you for taking time to comment. I responded to the first part of your comments (not quoted above) with the answer to the Gmail notifier for the Mac, but the quoted comments above I wanted to answer more fully here after dragging my butt up this morning (it’s 5:50 AM as I write this) to work on the book.

I’m not really sure I want to post the first couple thousand words because the beginning of the novel is not fully explained (even though I’m at page 143) and I’m not sure if it’s the one that I’ll ultimately stay with. I may go back and rewrite the first couple thousand words once I reach the novel end … but then again, maybe the beginning is solid and my concerns at the midpoint are totally unjustified.

The bottom line is the story continues to be shaping and taking some rather compelling twists and turns and I’m not completely sure where it’s taking me. I have some ideas, but I don’t really know. I’ve never written about the experience of writing a novel before. With my other books I didn’t tell anybody anything and here I’m trying to adjust to sharing mode because I do want to share at least some part of this story as it’s unfolding and yet at the same time I don’t want to post parts of the story that might not actually be part of the completed novel.

At this point, I am much more confident of the chapters that follow the beginning, though, so maybe I could share one or two of those as an excerpt. This last week has had me so busy with work that I only wrote just the one day, and then today (Saturday). So here I am, now a good 6,000+ words behind the 50k pace, but is certainly not out of reach (I’ve written over 10k words in a single day in the past, but that was long before NaNoWriMo and I’m definitely feeling some ring rust). I think the next week will leave me with more time to work on the book. Or rather, me doing a better job of getting up in the morning to write.

Anyway, there’s most of the explanation why I haven’t shared more of this story and again, thank you for asking It offered some necessary inspiration for me to stop procrastinating and get back to working on the book this morning. I do have an idea taking shape for using the framework of this novel which is much, much larger in scope than a single novel, but first I need to finish this novel and then see if the loose ends come together. Here’s a an excerpt from today’s writing session:

Rutger removed the picture, which had changed a bit as far as what she was wearing, but her face was the same. The faces never significantly changed for the disrupters. Appearance could be changed with piercings, tattoos and even plastic surgery, but the faces - the eyes particularly - could not be altered. Yes, there were contacts, glasses and other ways of changing the way someone’s eyes looked, but the eyes themselves never changed, no matter what color contacts or glasses.

Current page: 143 / chapter 15