And here I am, within sight of the Nano fin­ish line. I still have some writ­ing to do, and my end­ing has morphed some­what from what I had ori­gin­ally planned, but I think it’s going to all come together alright. I have a quiet even­ing before me and if I press on, I may get to the end by tonight.

Another unex­pec­ted death occured in my char­ac­ters, but this one served to strengthen the protag — she had been if not exactly res­cued, then helped a few times already and I think she needed to go through some hard things on her own. The next help­ing hand to appear will be in the form of another woman, and I like that. We’ve had her fig­ur­at­ive knight in shin­ing armor attempt and fail to res­cue her, but then she struck a bar­gain with her jailer and he helped her escape, but he died in the pro­cess, leav­ing her stran­ded in the wil­der­ness, sup­posedly close to some kind of set­tle­ment. Gotta get wrap­ping this story up, and since the title is “Phoenix and the Vulture”, we bet­ter have a bit more Vulture action before the end.

I’m ram­bling, and should be adding to my Nano word­count instead. See you on the other side.

Had an unex­pec­ted plot twist that really helped motiv­a­tion for a planned event. Thank good­ness I went with it when I wanted to write the death of the really bad guy instead of fol­low­ing the out­line points! It has cre­ated a much more tempt­ing internal con­flict for our heroine and while it didn’t add a whole new scene, it makes the story stronger, I think.

My word count is soar­ing and I’m hop­ing to be done a little ahead of sched­ule. Over 3000 words today sure helped.

Well, I’m truly in the final stretch of this novel. The Great Betrayal has occurred, my prot­ag­on­ist doesn’t yet know what’s in store for her, but I do and it’s gonna be fun to write!

I am writ­ing the scenes to fit into the 50 000 word count. A few bits I wrote today could be expan­ded into full scenes of their own, but would have to be in a dif­fer­ent POV and in a work this short I don’t want to do that. Should I decide to expand the whole novel later, that will be a good option.

Tomorrow I will be meet­ing with other writers at a cof­fee shop to cheer each other on and up the word count some more. So long as reg­u­lar life doesn’t totally implode in the mean time, I will fin­ish just a little ahead of schedule.

The words keep pil­ing up and my big cli­mactic end­ing is about to unfold. The third dis­aster in my three-​disaster struc­ture will hap­pen prob­ably the next time I sit down to write. It will change everything and pro­pel my unsus­pect­ing char­ac­ters into earth-​shaking decisions and a dra­matic end­ing that may or may not be happy. The jury’s still out on that.

I’m hop­ing to do at least a few days worth of writ­ing tomor­row, get the momentum rolling and just keep rolling with it. With the other life things going on, I’d be glad to fin­ish a few days before the dead line. And then read it! With any luck it will still make sense when read from begin­ning to end.

My story is get­ting into all kinds of inter­est­ing juicy parts now, and I’m really frus­trated at nor­mal life get­ting in the way of writ­ing time! I was unable to write at all yes­ter­day, but picked it up and plowed ahead today. I can’t see any prob­lem hit­ting the final 50 000 word count with this story, and I expect it to over shoot by maybe 10 00o words. Possibly more. Tomorrow will be a ‘light’ writ­ing day again, other respons­ib­il­it­ies crowd in, but then there’s the week­end, and another big push.

I con­tinue to feel grat­i­fied at how well this pro­ject is going, how much I am enjoy­ing it. Clearly I have gained sig­ni­fic­ant skill in the last two years, and that really is inspir­ing. How much bet­ter will I be in two more years? Hopefully lots!

I’m look­ing for­ward to re-​reading my story, if it counts as read­ing when you write it the first time.

I’ve been able to enter the Nano flow so well, let­ting new things emerge and con­nect, it’s been really neat. A lot of the time I know I used the same word last sen­tence, and that people are nod­ding alto­gether too often, but at the same time some really cool stuff has some­how found its way out of my fin­gers. I’m hop­ing it still all strings together well.

I’ve for­got­ten the names of some mostly incon­sequen­tial char­ac­ters who’ve shown up a time or two again, and I really don’t have time to go back and find out what I called them before so they are High Ladies This and That, who mostly appear together. That’s the sort of edit that will be easy to do.

I know I will need more char­ac­ter devel­op­ment /​deeper POV in a few choice places, but hope­fully by the time I get to the end I will know them bet­ter and be able to do that effect­ively. All in all, for my own self at least I’m proud of my story and what I’ve accom­plished. Even if Viv’s word count is big­ger than mine.

I stopped writ­ing today at just under a hun­dred words from the 20 000 word mile­stone. That’s pretty darn excit­ing. With sev­eral extra-​writing pro­jects requir­ing a lot of time and energy, this is par­tic­u­larly sig­ni­fic­ant. Thankfully the words came easy today, as I was writ­ing a fight scene. I hit a thou­sand words in just half an hour.

So noth­ing pro­found to say here, just cel­eb­rat­ing my vic­tor­ies. Go Me!

I’m get­ting to a new meaty part, the second begin­ning almost con­cluded. There’s a lot of high action toward the end of this novel, but now I’m still put­ting in place rela­tion­ships and polit­ics and vari­ous more subtle forms of con­flict that will even­tu­ally cul­min­ate in the explod­ing heli­copters type of con­flict. I did my best to plan each scene with a con­crete goal, but when change in a rela­tion­ship is the goal, there are so many ways one can go about that.

So it comes down to decision mak­ing. I’m find­ing that in my non-​writing life too, dir­ect­ing theatre pro­duc­tions. How will I decide to play this scene, on stage or on paper? There are infin­ite ways it could be done, but noth­ing moves for­ward until a decision is made. So you plunge in, and later, revise as necesary.

This novel is fol­low­ing the ‘Three Act Structure’ com­monly used. The first quarter of the book is the intro­duct­ory Act 1, the next two quar­ters are the main story part as Act 2 and Act 3 is the cli­max and den­ou­ment, the final quarter of the book.

I always struggle with begin­nings. Middles and ends I’m quite good at, but over­com­ing iner­tia, find­ing the right place, it’s a struggle for me. Once I got going, com­plet­ing Act 1 has been fun, but now in Act 2, my heroine is in a whole new situ­ation, a new envir­on­ment and other char­ac­ters. It’s just like hav­ing to write another begin­ning! So I’ve jerked and stuttered my way through the awk­ward­ness again and am now into the inter­est­ing bits. Hopefully more new and inter­est­ing things will crop up as did while writ­ing Act 1, and I’ll man­age to con­tinue into Act 3, where everything comes together, without this annoy­ing second-​guessing.

Oh, it’s fun when the words get rolling. I am enjoy­ing this pro­cess so much more than pre­vi­ous Nano exper­i­ence. I find I’m not rush­ing to hit the next plot point, I’m enjoy­ing the jour­ney. If it occurs to me that some­thing would be fun to write, I write it, even if it isn’t some­thing I’d planned, though often it does tie in to a nuance I’m already work­ing on. I have felt com­pelled, even driven to write before, I think this is the most fun I’ve ever had.

Which begs the ques­tion, what’s dif­fer­ent? Part of it is my slow matur­ing as a writer I’m sure, but I think the struc­ture to flex­ib­il­ity ratio in my plan­ning is just really work­ing for me. I cur­rently have over 4500 words writ­ten in one scene, the main pur­pose of which fits into a single sen­tence! But the joy is in the jour­ney, plant­ing seeds and bread­crumbs to fol­low up on later, things that keep the pages turn­ing and allow us to dis­cover the story along with the main char­ac­ter. At least, it’s amus­ing me.