Word count today: 1851

Total word count: 18018

A few minutes ago I pasted my document into the word-counting robot at the NaNoWriMo website. It came up with 17,795 words, a discrepancy of 223 words (the word count I've been posting has been based on the word count tool in Open Office, which I use as my word processor...it has more features than Works, and there's no point in buying Word so I can write a few letters). Either way, the good news is that I'm closing in on 20,000 words, and that in turn puts me within spitting distance of the halfway mark. If the ratio remains the same, there will end up being a 600 word gap between my word count and theirs by the end of the book. That's not the end of the world; it's only about 2/3 of a page.

I hate, hate HATE the story I'm writing. I went with sort of a sci-fi, Quantum Leap/Journeyman vibe (my character travels through space rather than time, and has quite a bit more control over the protagonists in either of the sci-fi shows I just mentioned, but the basic question of who's behind it, and why are similar). I feel like I'm so caught up in trying to advance the plot that the characters are suffering. I'd start over, but I'm so far into it that it would be difficult to finish the novel if I scrapped it and went with a different premise. I tried killing off one of my favorite characters to ramp up the tension. It opened up some new possibilities, but nothing that's going to serve as a reset to the storyline. I almost feel like that's what it needs at this point. I might try throwing in some horrendous Deus Ex Machina plot twist to try to go a whole other direction (not that there hasn't been a fair amount of that already). The novel doesn't have to entirely make sense...the whole point of doing this is to learn how to do it. So far, I've learned that I don't want to try to write watered-down sci-fi.