Word count today: 665

Total word count: 15,740

Still very tired tonight...my week has been jam-packed with some long days at work and family commitments after that. Last night and the night before I didn't start writing until after I'd have normally gone to bed. It's caught up with me tonight. I did get some work out, but only 665 words. The good news is that I'm still ahead of where I need to be to finish the book on time. That's good, because last night's and tonight's output combined is less than what I need my daily average to be to hit the 50,000 word mark by the end of November. So, that's bad news, too, I guess.

One more bit of good (I think) news is that the few words I did write tonight served to advance the plot significantly. A character I've been really invested in is the protagonist's therapist; he has been emerging as a sort of conscience for the protagonist, a bit of a sleuth into the intricacies of exactly what's happening to him, and an interesting character in his own right. In the loose sort of outline that's been unfolding in my head, I saw him as a major character spanning two timelines (the one I've been following, and a sort of alternate timeline in which the major characters would have had much different experiences, and would be profoundly changed as a result). Tonight I killed him off instead, and have ID'd the protagonist's potential love interest as the killer.

I was reading an email from the NaNoWriMo folks, and the author who wrote it was talking about the fact that, when writing a novel, you're the master of the universe. If a storyline seems like it's going nowhere, or if you feel mired down by a character, you can introduce an element that completely changes things. You can kill a character, for instance, and change the entire dynamic of the story. I've just killed off my second favorite character, so hopefully his death won't have been in vain.