NaNo 2015 - Week 4

The fourth week is over.  It's now third down and goal* for  The Elf's Prisoner.

The Stats:

• Words Written This Week: 12 962
• Words Written Total: 47 272
• Chapters Completed This Week: 9 plus one interregnum.
• Chapters Completed Total: 35, plus three interregnums.
• On-screen Deaths This Week: 1
• On-screen Deaths Total: 12

After the doldrums during the third week, I fell off pace.  Last weekend's 5338 words let me get back on pace, but the buffer I needed wasn't there.  The furthest ahead I managed to get was a half day, or about 800 words.  This means that I will be pushing hard over the last two days to get as much written as possible.  The final validation needs to be done by 23:59, local time, Monday.  Not having the time to write on Friday threw me behind, but yesterday put me ahead of par with a 2700 word effort.

Listening to characters is important to writers.  For most people, hearing voices is a sign that they should be seeing a doctor.  For writers, the voices get names and lives which then get placed into a story.  If the voices agree, the writing goes well.  If they don't, well, the writer either needs to listen to their needs or bludgeon the characters into submission.  The latter could lead to a strike, though.  That was the problem during Week 3.  Week 4, the characters were where they wanted to be and were happy to explore and to argue and to be awkward.

The main mission is almost done, but that mission has been superseded by events in-story.  Sure, Nyssa has her audience with the dwarves, but preventing a war between two realms has paled when the villain wants to throw the entire coast into chaos.  The five leads now have to find the villain and stop her.  Good thing I need scenes!

I had a scare on Thursday.  Windows wanted to upgrade to Win10.  The worst time for an upgrade is during NaNo; one glitch, and any time I might have had gets eaten up by troubleshooting.  Worse, time would still get chewed up by waiting for the update to finish.  If I had a backup machine, there's a chance I'd have gone through with the upgrade.  However, my older laptop is dying and hasn't been turned on in over a month because of hardware issues**.  So, no, Microsoft, I am not upgrading to Win10 right now.  I can't afford the potential downtime.

With two days left, the goal is to hit my 50 000th word, then validate.  The more written on the 29th, the less I have to write on the 30th, giving me time to make sure that I have the time to verify that I have written enough words according to the NaNo site.  Tuesday, I rest, and figure out if I want to continue writing The Elf's Prisoner.  First, though. I have 2800 words to write and I don't want my tenth NaNo to be the first I fail to win.


* Canadian Football League rules, in honour of the Grey Cup.
** A fan is seizing, leading to the system overheating.  If I could crack open the old laptop without damaging either it or any tools I'm using, I may be able to clean the fan properly.  That, too, requires time that I just don't have right now.