Word count today: 3,106

Total word count: 45,109

Words to go: 4,891

I did much, much better than I'd hoped to today. I went to the library after work and wrote about 1,900 words. I added another 1,200 this evening, and ended up with a really solid word count. I'd been hoping to hit 2,000 and just stay on pace. This actually puts me a little be ahead of the game. I only need to do about 1,600 words a day to hit the goal. I'm hoping to finish up on Thursday, but life could intrude again. Barring some catastrophe, I think I have a good chance to finish without taking it down to the wire.

The story has gone in a direction I wasn't expecting at all, which is kind of cool. Last night I had a great session of writing, and had a ton of ideas about where I'd take the story as it nears the climax. This afternoon, it started to go in a completely different direction. By the time I left the library, I had written the reveal of a major plot point, and it wasn't what I had expected at all. It was much more interesting (and unexpected, I hope). I have a ton of continuity problems, and this reveal sort of creates another one, at least with the narration. The narrator is supposed to be omniscient, but based on the direction I just took, the narrator didn't actually know what was going on. I think I'm going to have to stretch a little to resolve one of the plot points early in the book, and it's something I would take out if I worked on a second draft. The beauty of being forced to move forward (as the authors kept saying over and over in their pep talk emails and in interviews) is that you end up with something on the page that can be edited. Otherwise, you end up with a whole lot of nuthin', and you can't turn that into a second draft.

I have also been terrified of getting 30 or 40 pages into a book and realizing I have no plot, nowhere to go, and no way to end things. Another big fear has been plowing ahead and realizing I have 200 pages of useless, unfocused crap. Having done this, I realize that I can actually write something that I can work with. I wrote a beginning, there was a big ol' middle, and I seem to be hurtling toward something resembling an ending. It may not be pretty, but I wrote me a story!

I think I might try something serious in the nonfiction arena. The things I've learned through this experience have been incredibly instructive. The first thing is to write; the second is to not let myself stop writing, for any reason. If I hate what I've written I need to just let it be hateful and move on. That way I can end up with a first draft that I will have the luxury of hating entirely; it's possible that I might find I don't actually hate it all that much.