Falling Down

The first week is supposed to be the fastest and furious flurry of creativity. Mine was an example in a lack of self-discipline. There were too many other things I put first, little errands and so forth. I needed to make a greater commitment to actually doing this. Since I expected to fail, I could find reasons why I should not do my daily writing. And now I have to average over 1,800 words a day.

Hmm. I wonder if I can count the words I put in my blog towards words I write in my novel. That's another 568 words.

Anyway, another snippet from my weekend writing, from the same portion of the story as the first days writing.

Alec’s knees suddenly buckled. He teetered to one side and placed his hand on the wall for support. Bending forward he vomited on the wall. He stood there, hunched over, heaving and gasping, for a few minutes. After catching his breath and wiping his mouth and nose on his robes, he looked up. The preist did not appear to have turned around, although he had paused in his stride so that once Alec had recovered he would not be too far behind.

Word count: 3,652

A Week of Nothing

I got almost no writing done. Election night, well, that was kind of what I expected. But the rest of the week, work really took it out of me. I've got a much more free schedule next week, so I should be able to

Plus, I am really looking forward to doing a lot of writing this weekend. I gotta get up to about 12k words by Monday morning if I want to stay on pace. I should be able to get a good amount of the character introductions and development done and some work on the "historical" part of the story.

Anyway, here's a snippet of the developement of the "long dead" character.

The strong wind picked up briefly, and a gust of wind whipped against his armor and face. He stood unmoving against it as his long, raven hair left the confines of his armor and twirled behind him in the air. Feathers that adorned his armor danced in place, but remained firmly attached. As quickly as it started, the wind died down, and almost immediately a dull rumble echoed across the hills, signifying a nearby storm.

Word count: 2,007

Day One

I wanted to start with the most interesting part of the story to get myself into the groove early. It appears to have worked. Although the first 1000 words took a while, I found it hard to stop. I hammered out over 2000 words in my first night. That's good because there are some days later this month I don't anticipate doing much writing at all.

I'm not going to post everything I wrote. At least not right away. But here is a nice snippet:

For a moment, they hung in the atmosphere, dropping towards the surface like rain before the thousands of bombs across the planet detonated at once. Then the reaction began.

The virus, freed from it’s confines of the bomblets, began reacting with the atmosphere violently. It immediately began splitting hydrogen from the water molecules to consume as fuel, carbon from the CO2 to build replicas of itself and started storing the oxygen in complex molecules to unleash as an acid to break down all the material on the planet. It started slowly. Lights ignited across the face of the planet and started to grow in intensity. They turned into rings and began to get brighter as they descended through the atmosphere, devouring the air. The rings started connecting, then turning into spheres. The virus had almost reached the surface of the planet.

Word count: 2,018

Tracking the Failure

Paul Hawke has come up with a neat graph utility to show the progress towards 50,000 words. I've put it up on the sidebar. If you want, you can track your failure too. But you might actually win this thing. What do I know.

I have to admit, I feel like someone who has been inside for the winter about to run a marathon in the spring.

Page Zero

So I am doing this NaNoWriMo thing. I have had this Sci-Fi novel stuck in my head for over ten years and it's about time I did something about it. There is no way I can write anything serious until I get this out of the way.

I don't know if I will make it. In fact, I probably won't. 50,000 words is an awful lot to do in a month. Considering I work too much, type almost all day at my job and I have Halo 2 and EverQuest 2 coming out to vie for my time. That and I don't think I have 50,000 words of patience. Or that much to say. But we shall see.

Oh yeah, and I am doing the NaNoBlogMo thing too. I won't be publishing the whole thing, just snippets. And word to the wise of any NaNoWriMo-ers reading this -- don't use Blogger to write your novel. But by all means, put it up here.