miko2

Today was my day to catch up, but I goofed off much of the morning and early afternoon. Then I worked out on the treadmill for 40 minutes, then I went to the store. I tried making some cookies (two different sugarless recipes, they were both edible but not exactly ringing successes) and I watched Nerdcore Rising. And did a load of laundry.

Then I finally sat down to write something, at nearly 8 PM. 2 1/2 hours later I'm at 48,600 words. I should have no problem finishing up tomorrow. But it seems to me like I finished ahead of schedule the previous two years, so I guess I'm cutting it a bit close.

I'm finally to the part of the story where all the action takes place. I probably should have gotten to this point much sooner. ^_^

I wrote over 6,000 words today, so I'm at about 43,000 words.

The scary part is that even though I've written two chapters, I've barely started this particular story arc. It might be 100,000 or 150,000 words to tell this part of my story.

And then I still have to go back and write the middle section of the magical girl tales, and two earlier chapters that will link up with that section.

I'm sure some of that will need to be edited down, but still... I will need to find a way to force myself to continue writing after NaNoWriMo is over.

I'm at 32,900 words now. Fairly close to where I'm supposed to be (35,000 words).

I should be able to catch up the rest of the way tomorrow.

I wrote virtually nothing Friday or Saturday, and very little on Sunday. I'm extra lazy on the weekends, what can I say? Today I wrote about 2300 words, which means I caught up a ittle bit. I'm still 4200 words behind where I should be though.

Better news is that I'm still working from chapter 1 forward so that I'm finishing scenes and nearly have a complete chapter written. Well, I say chapter 1. It's actually chapter 35, I think. But you know, the first chapter of this section of the overall story. ^_^

I'm at 16,500 words now. I'm supposed to be at 18,300 words by the end of the day.

It feels like I've written a lot today and haven't gotten anywhere at all. That's partly because I wrote little yesterday and I kind of fudged the numbers a bit when I updated my number total, so that I said I'd written 16,000 words as of last night, but I was probably off by 500 words or more, I realize now.

I keep thinking I'm going to write a whole bunch and get way ahead, but on those days that I've actually written more than my daily target, I'm mostly just catching up to where I was supposed to be. But at least I'm not falling behind. ^_^

My current goal is still to hammer out a coherent first chapter... so much of what I've written is bits and pieces of scenes or nearly complete scenes consisting of just dialogue.

It's become sort of a ritual for me to use the month of NaNoWriMo to force myself to get some work done on my biggest fanfic story, Girls School.

For some reason, I'm able to focus during November and churn out 50,000-plus words. I wish I could do that every month -- then perhaps all of my various story ideas would finally get written. I had a goal this year of writing at least 500 words a day, and I stopped trying to do that by early to mid January. I've written very little since.

For what it's worth, I've already managed over 5,000 words this month -- over 10,000 if you count what I wrote in the last couple weeks of October as I geared up for the event. I'm on schedule and should add another 50,000 words to my story by December. However, as I've done in the past, I'm jumping ahead just a bit to tell another part of the tale -- meaning I still need to go back to link everything up, and rewrite large parts of what I've already written.

For a story that began as nothing more than an idea, "what if Ranma went to an all-girl's school?", and then became about 3 chapters that I wrote and forgot about for a year or more before rediscovering and deciding to continue, Girls School has morphed into a very long and complicated story that threatens to spiral out of control. I did not start with any ending point in mind, but there are plots set up in the first few chapters that I will naturally need to see through until the end. In the meantime, however, I keep going in other directions. Hopefully it's worth reading. ^_^

Just to help me keep things straight, here's an overview of what I've managed so far and what I'm aiming for:

Chapters 1-19: Published
Chapter 20: Needs some rewriting before publication
Chapters 21-24: written, not yet published
Chapters 25-26: unwritten
Chapters 27-31: written, needs major rewriting
Chapters 32-33: unwritten (estimated 2 chapters)
Chapters 34-42: unwritten/in progress (chapter totals estimated)

Breakdown by story arc and when written, with current word count:

Chapters 1-15: 70,500 words. This is, more or less, everything I had written prior to NaNoWriMo November 2007
Chapters 16-24: 75,000 words. This is everything I wrote in November 2008 (last year). This finishes a major story arc and nearly sets things up for my "magical girl" chapters.
Chapters 25-26: 2,500 words. Mostly unwritten, these are two linking chapters I need to finish before all the magical girl stuff happens.
Chapters 27-30: 36,000 words. This is my Magical Girl Story story part 1, containing the first big adventure. Written during NaNoWriMo 2007.
Chapters 31-33: 18,000 words. Partially written. This is the Magical Girl Story part 2, second adventure. I wrote this in November 2007 but stopped halfway through when NaNoWriMo was over.
Chapters 34-40: 10,500 words. For what it's worth, I'm skipping over my unfinished chapters 25-26 and 32-33, and for the moment I'm working on my Magical Girl Story part 3, the third adventure. This will be a longer arc and would finish up what I had originally planned for the magical girl story arc. I only have some vague ideas of what I might do beyond this point, but that includes....
Chapters 41-42: 5,500 words. These are some half-scenes and notes on another plot that I had in mind, for something I foreshadowed back in the Magical Girl chapters two years ago. I sketched this stuff out in early to mid 2009. To be honest, these two chapters are not likely to happen directly after the Magical Girl stories, but at the moment I have nothing else written this far ahead in the story.

Total written at the moment: about 220,000 words (only half of that published), with some 45,000 words or more expected to be added this month. If I can manage to get everything written up through chapter 42, I'll be over 300,000 words, I guess.

I didn't write much over the weekend but tonight I worked hard on my story and fought my way through the big final fight scene. It's late so I'm going to bed... I still need to write a few paragraphs to kind of do a minor wrap up. I'll need to do more wrap up in chapter 25, but I'm at the end of chapter 24 finally. I even read through from the beginining and edited it, and I think it reads pretty well.

Counting from November 1st, I've written 66,000 words. I'm not sure how much of that was just today, but anyway I feel accomplished.

I really need to edit and publish chapter 16 now.

I was looking for a cool way to portray how Mr. Honda banishes the demon... and I went back to the story where Kasumi is possed in the manga. In that, the priest writes "bean" on a ward and uses this to drive the demon from Kasumi's body. You know, this big kidnap plot has been so deadly serious that I'd almost forgotten how silly the original manga is.

So I scrapped the search for a "cool" and "realistic" demon banishing phrase. Instead, I got silly. ^_^ I think that will work, too.

For what it's worth, I'm still working hard on my story. In fact I did little else tonight -- I did some Christmas shopping, I came home, I exercised, and then I wrote.

I'm at about 59,000 words now, and I've gotten through the first half of the big fight... the part where nearly everyone gets crushed by the demon, before Ranma and Cologne and Kohana's grandfather show up. I also haven't written the part where the demon defeats a group of private commandos from the Honda estate security forces. ^_^ He's a badass demon. I'm having fun though, I think the part of the fight I've written so far works pretty well, and I'm getting close to the end. Sachiko finally gets to show off all her cool shinmei-ryu moves, and Yoriko gets to be a hero instead of just a two-dimensional bad-tempered gangster.

Well... I'm near the end of chapter 24 anyway. I don't have much of anything written for chapter 25, which is a kind of wrap up / epilogue for this part of my story.

Anyway, that's about 3,000 words or so written today. Unlike yesterday it's a lot of finished scenes.

I'm not going to stop to edit and publish chapter 16 until I have at least chapter 24 written, maybe chapter 25 too. Because continuing to write is easier than stopping and starting again later.

I didn't get much written yesterday but I stayed up late and wrote maybe a thousand words. This morning I wrote maybe another thousand. My sisters and nieces didn't come over today, so I've been at my parent's house all day and it's been very quiet. After goofing off in Second Life for several hours and watching two episodes of Forensic Files, I finally sat down and began to write.

At this point, according to Open Office and based on what the word count for my document was before I started, I'm probably still a couple of hundred words shy of 50,000. However I expect to work on it tomorrow as well... I'm still in the middle of the big kidnap plot, and I want to get that done. So I went ahead and validated... the total document from where I started writing up to where I'm currently at is actually 61,464 words, according to NaNoWriMo's web page.

That would include some stuff I'd written previously, but no completed scenes. So, in combination with what I expect to write tomorrow, I declare myself a winner!

Well, as expected I didn't get anything written after leaving work today, what with packing, driving to Longview and talking to my parents for a couple of hours.

On the other hand I got some 2,000 words written while at work, so I'm at about 44,000 words.

It remains to be seen how much I can get written tomorrow before everyone shows up.