Word count today: 2,534

Total word count: 28,774

I went to Barnes & Noble again today. It's just the right kind of place. Some people go there to eat and talk (while I was there a group of people from a retail store were having some kind of departmental meeting, and later a group of pre-teen girls were giggling at the table next to mine), but a lot of folks are there to work or to read. It's a great place to be creative and to get out of my usual routine. With my rewards club discount at chai latte is about $3.50...not bad for a couple hours' worth of creativity. I spent another hour or so working on the novel after my daughter went to bed. All in all, not a bad day in terms of output. I'm starting to feel like I can do this.

I've solved the continuity and plot issues in a Deux Ex Machina sort of way--but one that I think actually fits the story and moves it along in a reasonable fashion. It's sci-fi story, so I advanced the story 20 years and set the action aboard a starship that kind of popped out of nowhere. I've managed to kill off almost the entire population of the world, but I think I have somewhere to go with the remaining 1.5 million humans (and the five or six people I'm going to track for the rest of the book). For the first time I feel like this could actually gel into a first draft of something that could live on as a second draft. I can see ways to double back and tie up the major plot elements from the first half of the book; I think I'll end up coming back around to them at the end. I was kind of despairing of ever having this story make sense, but I think it might actually end up tracking. I'm not going to go so far as to say it would be readable (or even good), but just the idea that I might actually finish with something fairly coherent is kind of exciting. I feel pretty good about what I wrote today (although I'm afraid there might be some pretty uncomfortable parallels between my interstellar vehicle and one in a book I read about 20 years ago). The prose is flowing a little more freely, and I feel like I have a better handle on the story.

Under the NaNoWriMo banner on this page, there's a link to a progress report. One of the things it does is track how many words I'd need to write to hit the goal of 50,000 words by the end of the month. When I started the month I needed to get 1667 words a day out; after I missed a few days last week, that daily average crept up to 2100. I got almost 3200 words written, and today I wrote a little over 3500. That's brought the average down to under 2000. I'm hoping to have a few good days of writing under my belt over the long holiday weekend (I took Wednesday off, and don't go back until Monday). I'll probably hit 30,000 words tomorrow.