Well, I signed up to do NaNoWriMo again this year, after failing pretty miserably in 2005 and skipping 2006.

I'm hoping to do a better job of sticking with it this year, and even though I haven't the slightest clue about the plot (or even the genre, for that matter), I remain hopeful that I'll reach at least some of my targets, even if I don't make it to 50,000 words by the end of the month.

Still behind. Falling further behind. Still not surprised.

What is surprising to me is that I'm getting almost all of the writing done while at work, and virtually none of it done while at home. I blame this mostly on the variety of distractions available to me at home that are not available to me at work.

I'm hoping to change that, though, and so I'm setting a personal target of 20,000 words by midnight Friday. Yes, I'm aware that to meet that, I'll have to write over 4,000 words per day between now and them. Yes, I do believe I can do that, as long as I can stop fooling around with other stuff when I'm home.

As for developments in the story, I've closed out chapter 2 and started chapter 3, which so far is another (comparatively) dull build-up chapter. I intend to have a major plot advancing moment in here, and I even have some idea of what it is, but I'm still not sure how I want to go about doing it, and I need to write some of the boring stuff to be able to get to a point where I can do it. Hopefully today's writing will take me up to (and possibly beyond) that.

Unsurprisingly, I'm still behind. 5,421 words behind, as a matter of fact. I do take solace in the fact that I'm more than halfway to where I ought to be; it's something, at least.

So far the actual developments in the story have been rather dull; this is one of those chapters that is only a building block for later things to come. The idea is that the main character (Sam) is going to be sent out to follow an orchestra around for two months, part of which would take him overseas. So he needs to get a passport, which means he needs to get a copy of his birth certificate. But the government is changing the rules for passports soon, and there's quite a crowd waiting to get copies of their birth certificates. Eventually, Sam gets to the front of the line and finds out that there's a "hold" on his records, for reasons so far unknown to him. I'm wrapping up his reaction (angry and frustrated, as you can imagine) and then I'll have to figure out the next chapter.

As expected, I've fallen even more behind with the weekend. I managed to catch up to Thursday's target on Friday, so now I'm three days (and almost 5,000 words) behind. On the plus side, I won't be going as insane at work for today and tomorrow, which should definitely help things.

I'm still short of my target by about 600 words. I continue to blame this on having to deal with people at work, which puts me into a state of mind where I don't want to do anything except sleep and/or die.

Progress is being made, though, so at least I haven't become stagnant. I'm still only on the second chapter, but with short- and long-term ideas for where to go with the story, the act of writing is the only thing slowing me down right now.

I'm hoping to get a lot done (via my laptop) on the train tonight, assuming that the less-than-useless keyboard frustrates me to the point of leaving it on the tracks for the train to crush.

Well, it didn't take long for me to fall behind. It wasn't really unexpected, though; I don't get much done at work, because I'm too busy trying to not kill myself or those around me, and Wednesday nights I spend down at the model railroad club. So the first chance I had to do some decent writing yesterday started at 10:30pm.

Around midnight, I decided to take a quick nap, since I was tired and not being particularly productive. I ended up resetting the alarm and going for 7 hours of sleep instead of 2. Such is life, I suppose.

It wasn't a day without progress, though; I managed to finish out the first chapter. I'm quite surprised at how it come out; it's rather dialogue-heavy, and dialogue is something I've never really felt comfortable doing in a story, instead tending to provide detailed descriptions of scenes and actions from the third-person view. So now I have to figure out how to work in some intermediate stuff between the real meat of the plot.

Between some quiet time at work and some more writing back at home, I managed to beat the daily average (1,667 words) for my first day. More importantly, though, I've finally figured out some parts of a plot, which is something I didn't have even after I started writing yesterday.

What I have so far is the story of a journalist in a mid-sized fictional city. He's working on his weekly opinion column when the power goes out, trashing his work. At the same time, he gets an anonymous phone call promising a juicy lead if he meets the informant in a 'secure' location. I didn't really think about it until right now, but it very much resembles the scene from The Matrix where Neo gets in the car to go meet Morpheus (complete with the bridge and the rain).

At the appointed time, a homeless guy starts banging on the window. The main character (named Sam, for now), being a bit of an elitist with a dislike for the homeless, tries to tell the guy to get lost; the guy claims to be the source Sam was coming to meet, but it wasn't safe where they are. After some debate, they both get in the car, and a cop comes speeding by. Sam peels out, spurred on by the homeless guy, but stops when he realizes what he's done. As Sam waits for the cop to walk up to his car, the guy basically carjacks him.

That's as much as I got written, but after I finished writing I took some time to think about where I was going from there. My thoughts at the moment are to have the homeless guy be an ex-advisor/confidant for either the mayor or one of the city councilman (who all served in the same unit in the military). They received high commendations from the military, went into politics, and are well-respected members of their party, which wants them to eventually run for higher office to replace the used-car-salesman types currently in power (whom the people are increasingly distrustful of). However, they have some secret between them that they want to keep hidden (some atrocity committed during the war, most likely), and the military also wants to keep hidden (because it was quite common, but a well-kept secret).

I'm still not sure of the immediate next step, but at least I now have some idea of where the larger plot is to go, which will make it tremendously easier to keep writing. I'm hoping to pound out around 3,000 words today, because I'm not going to have the benefit of a full 30 days to write, and need a daily average of around 2,500 words to reach 50,000 by November 30.

Thirty days. Fifty thousand words. One novel. Such is the goal of NaNoWriMo, or the National Novel Writing Month contest, which starts tomorrow and spans the whole month of November.

Since I'm a glutton for punishment, apparently, I'll be giving this a shot. I'm hoping that by forcing myself to sit down and write every night, even if I don't make the 50,000 word target, I'll still come away having broken out of the rut I've been in since I started working full time. Assuming I remember to do it, I'll try to make (more or less) daily updates of progress here.