Today Was A New Day, But Yesterday Was The Worst

Tonight it has been established that I sort of suck at sprints. But I think that's because in the entire four years that I've seriously done NaNoWriMo, I think I've done about five of them. Tonight was actually two of them. One was a 15 minute sprint where I wrote a grand total of 434 words.

Usually dialog, which I'm writing a lot of, goes really quickly for me. But I think the problem is I'm writing things like police and ambulance dialog which is something that I've only done once before. And that was a cop in an alternate history who followed British law and not law from the United States.

I'm getting into some really unknown territory as I've never witnessed a drug bust.

And I've got a problem. The Little Green Envelope is covered in the cocaine that Tabitha is overdosing on and he's sitting there in Andy's hands. So naturally the cops are going to want to confiscate him. Sitting in an evidence locker will totally lose my point of view. So I have to figure out a way that he can stay unincarcerated and get him to the University of Chicago hospital where Kate is currently in the waiting room and Tabitha is currently getting treated for a drug induced seizure.

Backed myself into a word corner here. Andy or Donovan need to be quick on their feet and with Donovan that's a fat chance.

I don't want to make the cops idiot but this is a story told by an "envelope of action" and it is an action movie convention to have the cops dumb and the kids (by kids I mean a group of late-20somethings) smart so it will make logical sense for this to happen.

I should even have Little Green Envelope pontificate on it.

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So, yeah, the Word War.

Yesterday went from bad to worse. The 12-year old from last year who I thought wasn't on Toronto's team this year upped her word count by 85,000 yesterday evening.

Suddenly the substantial lead that we had evaporated and we were down by 8,000 words.

There is something stinky in Denmark here as she made the comment in chat yesterday that whatever she writes from now on has to have a plot. I get the impression she's writing stream-of-conscious with no plot.

It's being resolved by the three captains right now but can I just say that any doubts I had about the unity of Team Chicago were really put to rest today.

Instead of throwing in the towel (like I almost did yesterday when I found out and some of New York's writers almost did as well), Team Chicago rallied during the work day and we were actually ahead for most of today - at one point by 10,000 words. Though now we're down 8,000 again as one of their writers did a huge jump (one that is working hard for every word so I don't begrudge them).

A five day weekend beckons for me and a four day weekend beckons for most though so hopefully we can put this thing away going into the last week.

smwalter, who I'm just going to say it pretty much has Chicago's Most Valuable Writer award in the bag, organized a chat tonight and six or seven of us are typing until our fingers fall off.

Well, I'm typing until midnight because I have to wake up and pack tomorrow before having breakfast with not-Kate and then my sister driving us to Michigan.

Hopefully Toronto won't know what hit them. And, regardless, we've now opened a 100,000 word lead on New York City. Wow!

Anyhow, yesterday did go from bad to worse but today is a new day. And hopefully by the end of it, Chicago will have recovered, I will have recovered and the rest of November will be a breeze.

Even if up until this point the breeze is carrying more than a whiff of crap stink!