foxfirestudios.net

Ever had the feeling that the last part of something takes longer than the rest of the item in question.  Like slowing down at the last ten cents of a $50 fill-up of gas, just so you can get at the exact amount.

It’s the same thing for Mim Su Sa as well.  It took me a while for me to get the last plot card worked on, but I managed.  I can say now that I have finished the first draft of ‘Murder in Main Street USA,” way before even the unadjusted deadline of July 3rd.

The length of the file is 38.25K in characters, and it took me 41 Days.  Not bad for my first major attempt to NaNoWriMo (and my second book.)  Yeah, yeah, I know.  A NaNoWriMo goal is 50K in 31 days.  Let me work toward that, okay?

I’ll be stashing the first draft for a while so I can rest up for a bit.  After that I’ll start on the plot cards for my third book.  Either Blood and Metal or maybe my next NaNoWriMo attempt, an Adam Packbell book.  Probably BaM, since I can squeeze a NaNoWriMo between drafts in BaM.

But anyway, this is a major event.  Even with the setback I had, I succeeded in my goal.

You want to know why I do not trust myself with a 50K word novel in under 30 days right now? It’s because of the chance of disasters like what I had to suffer this week. It’s Murphy’s Law being an absolute and, when you promise yourself to write that book “Come Hell or High Water?” Well, guess what? Hell _and_ High Water comes.

And when you have to trust a Vista machine to write your book, well? Just who decided to flick me the middle finger?

Yep. Vista can be as bitchy as ME at times.

It took me a total of four–yes, you heard that correctly–reinstalls of Vista just to get all of my programs up and running properly. It’s a good thing I decided long ago to save my files on a jump drive, or I would be pissed.

Be that as it may, I finally weathered the storm, but that means that I lost a lot of precious time to write a book. But that’s when I gave myself this stress-relieving permission: In the event of a computer related disaster, you are allowed to add up to 7 days in your deadline.

Which is what I did. I moved the deadline for Mim Su Sa from July 3 to July 10th. That should compensate for the time I lost.

Otherwise, progress has been good, and I’ve been developing a lot of scenes and characters. I won’t drop all the details right away, but I will state that the developing as I go might add some extra cards to the stack I have with me. This is a good thing, that means that the story is developing as I go along, and that’s what I wanted.

So with the corrections, I set my status at, as of 9PM June 7th, 15.6K words, 31 Cards to go, and 33 Days remaining.
Barring any more disasters.