NaNoWriMo

Okay, so it's Friday, and I realize that I have a whole lot of words in NaNo. Crazy. Um, they're pretty bad. But I have figured out some plot things by doing this (this is NOT the way to get character development, though!). The words--man. It's a mix of past and present tense, flat-out telling ("Fen says X, only cooler than this"), and some third person I haven't quite changed to first. Right now I'm looking at the section I'm starting (the middle third) and thinking how cool it would be to read it and know the answers to all these things! You know--the things in the outline that are like, and then they decide what to do from here, or, and then Coren overhears something she shouldn't--and they discover her secret, and she's toast! Only, my subconscious hasn't had time to figure out what those secrets are yet. Um. So far I might end up racing through this to get to the end and mark what *kind* of thing should happen--and then go back to write, you know, real scenes. The one thing I'm learning from all of this is that no matter how much I fight the barbarian within and try to appear civilized, I am teeth-baring, snarling competitive underneath. No matter how bad it is, I can't seem to give up until I've matched my word count from the day before. Not that my sister hasn't known this all along.

The sun continues to shine, which is lovely (although, as robinellen says, it would be prettier if all the leaves hadn't fallen off first). Our house is coming to pieces around our ears, though. The garage door opener is possessed--it will start to go down, then pause, and go back up. So we had to unplug it, so basically I'm glad we have good weather, because I don't want to deal with it in stormy weather, when we do like to put the car inside. We did fix a doorknob and plug some large gaps between the cupboards and the dead space above them, but last night the computer just up and stopped working. We have no idea how to fix it. Which is bad. DH is the computer equivalent of the guys in the 50s who would tinker with cars all the time. He can rebuild laptops, even. But it looks like either the motherboard is fried or the heat sink is destroyed, or both, or neither. In any case, we can't get it to load. And that's bad, since it has a lot of important things on it. Luckily not my writing. My laptop, such as it is, is the only working computer in the house. Sigh. This is just not the time to deal with this. I feel like Ron: "Why is everything I own rubbish?"

At least it's Friday and tomorrow we can sleep in, provided our kids let us. Or at least, we don't have to drag anyone anywhere. I'm sort of looking forward to that. Have a great weekend, everyone, and good luck to all the NaNo writers!