Still on birthday vacation and the place we're staying at serves a lot of horrible food. I couldn't even figure out last night, as we ate the slop, what in the world the "beef and vegetable barley soup" tasted so awfully of - rotten celery? I got a lousy Caesar salad (just limp lettuce on a plate with stale croutons, a slice of gummy garlic bread and some lackadaisical dressing with cheese), a cup of gritty clam chowder (which, I will admit, at least tasted as I expected it to) and a bowl of the aforementioned beef-free beef and vegetable soup. Total bill was over $20!!

Word count to date = 5,903

Things are inching along like a worm though compost. Slimy, unpleasant, eating up garbage and pooping out dirt which, at least, can be used to grow something pleasant. Man, that metaphor is more apt than I expected. I should call this blog "The Merry Exploits of a Garbage Writer."

I did an anagram of my name to pass the time. I came up with "Has a trash bar," or "Shat a bra rash." Ha. I like the first one..

11/03/2006 (written offline to be uploaded latter)

Today is the day after my birthday. Slight headache from staying up too late reading Eragon in bad light.

Total word count 3,933.

I would like to get it over 4000 today, or write another three pages if I have the time. The problem is, I am away from home and typing on an unfamiliar keyboard and so the words aren't coming as easily or as comfortably. I wrote a whole lot more garbage today, regressed my main character back to age 15 and burned down a school. Don't you love it when your story runs away from you?

ARG! I gotta get to work (that is, my day job!)

2500+ words total now.

Most of what I wrote today was important, but will most likely be trashed. I was struggling with the age of my main character. Nine is too young, I am sick of stories about 13 year olds, and 17 seems too old... I realized that the reason most stories are written with protags at puberty is because at that time, besides being totally messed up by hormones, people haven't been given the rights to make their own choices yet. By age 16 or 17, they have pretty much made up their minds (even if they don't realize it) about what they want to do and what they believe in. So I ended up going with the older age. Plus I want her to have a romance, and 13-year-olds getting it on is just icky.

Greetings! This is a journal of my efforts and my life during National Novel Writer's Month. Yay. One month, 30 days (why did they pick such a short month?), 50,000 words (which, I hear, isn’t even that long a novel).

Day one.

1400 word.

So far so good.

Once upon a time, my auntie Jean gave me "Arrows of the Queen" by Mercedes Lackey for my 13th birthday. I devoured that book, and the others in the Valdemar series. I didn't like all of them (and actually now, I’m not very interested in rereading them!) but they all held my attention in one way or another, and in such a fashion that I longed to write a story (or trilogy) of my own. At that time, I started forming scenes in my mind, and by age 17, I had started laying down characters and stories and trying to tie it all together.

My plot is a tenuous thread made of old, fragile material that stretches and twists and tangles in the wind. It has snapped a few times, and I have worked to knit it back together or tie it to other threads branching out in many different directions. It is my hope that, by the end of this month, it shall be a hearty rope, binding my ideas in one cohesive story.

A worthy and noble thing to work for. We’ll see if I can do it…