Last night was day #3 of National Novel Writing Month and both Tammy and I are off to great starts. As of this morning, our word counts are neck-and-neck at almost 6500, which is a healthy 1500 more than we should have at this point. Almost a day ahead, three days in! 🙂 Again, Tammy’s finding that she needs to write in longhand, at least when she’s thinking really hard, and then she’s transcribing onto the computer. I’m finding success with my typewriters; I switched last night from the Underwood Standard to my Smith-Corona portable just for fun and fancy. I think I’ll continue swapping night to night. It’s what I expected: physically strenuous but viscerally exciting in a mechanically percussive sort of way. My forearms and hands are already getting stronger.
So we both have our “challenges”, but at this point our greater uncertainties are over the novels themselves. That’s to be expected. Last year it wasn’t until the 40,000 mark that I really felt confident that I would win: I could see everything that needed to happen, and it would take about 10,000 more words. You can watch our progress using the little graph in the sidebar. I whipped that up myself this year. The PHP code accesses NaNoWriMo’s word count web services and generates the HTML. I would have used the stock widget from NaNoWriMo like last year, but even as of last night, theirs weren’t working.
Yes I’m trying to write my protagonist 1 out of a corner. Right now anything this character says would make her look completely nuts which would send protagonist 2 running the other way screaming.