Days 18-23

This has been a peculiar few days, punctuated by managing to screw up my back on Saturday (Day 20) moving furniture. I’ve been confined more or less to either the bed or the couch with occasional (and temporary) vertical forays into the rest of the house. I haven’t been away from the house since last Friday and I’m getting a little stir crazy. I’ll be trying my first trip out later this morning, but sitting for more than 20 minutes is impossible, so it won’t be a long trip.

You would think this would be a good thing as far as the writing goes, but amazingly when your back is tweaked out and you can’t really get comfortable, efficient writing for hours on end is not really possible. So the bad news is that I haven’t finished writing three novels in the last five days. The good news, still and all, is that I am not too far away from finishing NaNoWriMo, as you can see below.

About 6500 of that is on thread four (of five), which I don’t think I’d started when I last wrote about writing. And currently I have about 5400 of thread five, which will add another 1700 before I’m done. It’s definitely the shortest thread so far (number four represents only half the eventual material), but since the story is rather simple and it’s sort of a culmination of the other four, that isn’t surprising.

So, by the end of the day—fates and my back willing—I will have finished NaNoWriMo’s requisite 50,000 words. I’ll not be writing any premature “the month that was” crap yet. ;) However, this whole process has turned a bit surreal—not in a bad way necessarily. Here’s the thing: I am actually finishing stories that have been waiting around unfinished for about 10 years now. In a sense, these stories have always been “not done,” and they are becoming done.

If things continue as they have been, I will have written, by the end of November, over 50,000 words of new material for my novel. And, without stretching things too terribly, I might have a completed rough draft of the entire book, all 5 threads/sections, by the end of 2004, ten years to the year after beginning the damn thing.

Sometimes it’s just nice to kick back for a moment and smile.

• Days: 18-23
• Days Left: 7
• New Words: 12293
• Total Words: 48299
• Cooking: My wife cooked us some cheese tortellini last night. Oh, and matzo ball soup for lunch. Yummy!*
• Fluids: Diet Coke with Lime. Water.
• Exercise: Furniture moving for a while on Saturday.
• Reading: ESPN News Crawl.
• Listening: iTunes Library on Random.
• Obsessing on: Walking and standing.

(*) Thank God for Denyse making me take it easy. I probably would have been pushing too far and screwing my back up worse. I’m not a good patient and thus have no patience.