I have about 3000 words to go now, and about one day to do them in. If you’d asked me on October 31 what I would think of writing 3500 words in a day, I would have said, Are you nuts? but pretty much my take on it now is Piece of cake. I guess I shouldn’t get too cocky. After all, I have 3500 words to go and I still don’t have a damn killer. None of the suspects I’ve set up feel right. I’m wondering if I have to write in a whole new character, which would definitely take care of those 3500 words easy.
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I feel kind of gypped. I haven’t had any of the flow experiences other NaNo’ers report. I haven’t dreamed about my story or my characters. (I did have an amazingly cool dream one night, but using standard dream interpretation techniques it’s clear the dream was about me, not about my book.) I haven’t had any days where the story just took off by itself and I could write and write and write and the well would stay primed.
And certainly no 10,000 word days. I know the most I’ve done in a day is 3500. The first time I did 3500 I came home and told Darin, I need to sleep now. After that it was like, Hey, not a bad writing day. No big deal.
2000 is a much easier number to contemplate on a daily basis, though.
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I have realized I need writing music. I had very few albums on iTunes. Our CDs never really got unpacked after the move—no central stereo system any more, the way we’d had it set up in our living room in LA. The CDs all got stashed in the dining room closet, which does have the wiring to set up a household-wide stereo system, just not the stereo. So as I’ve been sitting here at the dining room table, typing away, I’ve been taking stacks of CDs out of the closet and ripping them. Not all of them (we have a couple of hundred). Just a range of music and moods that might help me when writing. I don’t always want to listen to the conversations at the table next to me when I’m out at a cafe somewhere.