I started okay, what with not having the faintest idea of what to write this year.  Got up early, fired up my work computer, and wrote some outline. So far so good.

But unfortunately, my work computer, running Ubuntu, can’t detect the onboard sound card, which means I can’t listen to any music while I work. First, I tried to fix that, but I couldn’t find out what kind of motherboard I have (neither lspci nor lshw being any help). So I looked to see if I had a spare sound card. And I did, in a little bag of random hardware. But it didn’t fit in the mother board – but a spare NVidea GeForce 5600 did. That might make things a little prettier, if nothing else…

I am reminded of this XKCD comic.

So yeah. With a little luck, if I just rip the thing out again and delete my xorg.conf, all will be well again.

The day’s not actually over yet, but I don’t have much hope for this particular day.  I shall just have to do better from now on in.

Work continues on my NaNoNovel, even though November is over. I’m currently back in the outlining stage, as it turns out I didn’t do as good a job as I thought I had, and I’m flailing about a bit. I’ve been listening to my characters, and they’re all “We’re all fine here, thanks”, so I need to check what my bad guys are wanting to do in order to shake things up a bit and get them moving.

I’m also pondering whether I can actually continue with the first-person perspective I started with, or should I rewrite in the more usual third-person limited. It would free me up somewhat – as it stands, everything has to be seen or heard by Betto, my ex-monk, and letting go of that would allow me to spend time with other characters. But on the other hand, it would be a lot of work, and on the other other hand, I quite like what I’ve got so far, and don’t see that changing perspective will necessarily make it better.

As I’m no longer NaNo-ing, however, I may take some time out here and there to work on other projects, such as The Eleven Second Club, which is a monthly character animation competition. Plus, Intrepid should be needing new CGI soon.

All in all, life goes on.

Tomorrow, I go to Edinburgh for an interview. We shall see what happens.

That is all.

I don’t know if it was q10, or the novel was flowing, or what, but I found that I was able to write faster today. However, I’ve been fighting a migraine most of the day, so I didn’t push it as much as I could have. Apart from anything else, I wanted to leave something for tomorrow…

The two main obstacles I see remaining are continuing after I hit 50K, and continuing after November. I want to do both these things, and actually finish up the novel from beginning to end.

Strangely, the last session went so well I’m almost convinced the word count’s gone wrong somewhere – like I wrote a thousand words I don’t remember doing. If it weren’t for the fact that the OpenOffice.org Writer application and the NaNoWriMo wordcount verifier both agreeing, that is. Maybe I just lost count somewhere.

Good grief, I could be done in a few days!

Part Three took from 7ish onwards. As I’m not paying 100% attention, it takes a lot longer to get the last 2000 or so words than it does the first two – I didn’t finish up until after 10. Part of this is how sore my wrist is when typing, after my over indulgence in Guitar Hero on Saturday. I think I shall have a go at some ice.

I’ve got myself to 38K, which despite what I wrote yesterday, I’m back up to the 2K/day rate, so go me. It wasn’t a 5K day, merely a 4.4K day, because I had words left over from yesterday, and I just came to a dead stop at 38K. The last few hundred or so were actually quite tough, as I had to come up with a new monster and a fairy tale to go with it. Don’t think I was entirely successful, and it shall no doubt be revised in the future.

So, um, yay me, all in all.

No wait, I just realised I need to be elsewhere renewing my lease. Like right now. Must dash!

Sunday; very, very tired. Very, very tired all day. No particular reason that I could tell, but that’s the way it was. Tried for a bit of a kip during the late afternoon, but it didn’t work too well.

However, I did eventually rouse myself to at least catch my 2K for the day. I’m behind the 2K rate once more, and I’m pretty sure I’m not going to catch it again, but I’m still ahead of the 50K game, which is all good.

I hope I can get back to the rhythm I had last week; it felt pretty comfortable. I was a tad blocked the last couple of days, but I think I know where I’m going from here. There may even be some magic happening in my fantasy novel, at last.

However, Betto is now learning to dance. This is important.