And then some.

It's the Saturday before Hallowe'en, time for parties and costumes and mistakenly bedding the wrong kangaroo costume clad spouse at drunken parties.  Good thing I don't drink or go to parties, and my wife doesn't dress as a kangaroo (most of the time).

What did I do on the Saturday evening before Hallowe'en?  I bashed out enough words to put this draft of BookB at 50,000 words.  That's right, I sat in a chair at my kitchen table and played pretend in my head with my fingers flying across the well worn keyboard of my MacBook.

I did it to music of course.  Not the music you'd traditionally get at a Hallowe'en party, tonight it was Radiohead's In Rainbows, which I bought during their blitz "pay what you want" sale for $8.  It did roll over into Kid A at some point, but I was too engrossed in my own little world to notice.

Speaking of Hallowe'en, or better still All Hallow's Read, check out yesterday's blog post for links and information on getting a free audiobook written and narrated by Neil Gaiman while supporting charity.

I've been thinking a lot about NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), and religiously following Kevin J Anderson's blog for great tips for any writer, even if they aren't participating in NaNo.  The goal for NaNo is to write 50,000 words in the month of November, a worthy goal for any writer who holds down a day job.

They classify 50K words as a novel, and at ~200 manuscript pages (205 with my style setup) I suppose it is.  But having hit that mark a few times now I'm not sure I could fit this novel into such a tight constraint.  Granted, the outline sits around 19,000 words, but I'm a heavy outliner.  I'm shooting for just shy of 100,000 words, and looking at my outline versus what I've written, that's about spot on.

For those of you who follow my blog, or who have randomly jumped around and read that I've just entered the Third Act of the draft, you might wonder how I could possibly only be at 50K words.  Well, fear not my friends (and potential enemies looking for weaknesses via my blog), I have a fair number of chapters that still need to be written further back in the draft, and a good number of small re-writes to do.

If you recall (or care to search), I re-jigged the entire outline and dropped a number of viewpoint characters to rein in the story to something a little more manageable and character focused.  I'm still on track to finish the draft by the end of the year, and if I succeed for the second straight year in NaNoWriMo, possibly by the end of November.  Tack on a few months for edits and polish and I could be submitting by February.

Then again, I could be working on the next revision to clean up any major holes I leave this time :)

We'll see soon enough.  Either way, I intend to enjoy the ride more than any possible accidental and mistaken pseudo-marsupial encounters I could be having.

- Grimm

P.S. Kat Ellis retweeted my Blog update announcement on Twitter (cause that's where you retweet things) and my readership for last night's blog post tripled!  For any of you who stick around, it's good to have you.  There will be free explosions for words for all.