Well, then end is sort of in sight. 37,000 words written, which is about 35,000 more than I’ve ever put together on one piece before. The story has evolved a bit, and is ludicrous, naturally but should just stretch to the magic 50,000. My aim is to both hit that mark and finish the story, preferably by the end of this coming weekend, which will not be easy.

I had not appreciated how difficult writing 1,000 – 2,500 words, which seems to be my modal average, every day would be. On day 22 of that, I’m suffering physical fatigue; hands ache badly. Laptop keyboards are not useful for lengthy attacks.

But yesterday was good. It was the chapter I had been dreading. It’s all exposition, essentially, and my way around that was to present the information as extracts from a journal (as in a diary, not peer reviewed, edited, scientfic publication as the Beloved thought).  The good part of this was that it was all first person and dialogue-free, unlike the rest of the unlikely yarn. The bad side of it is that it was meant to be by a Victorian scientist in 1879. No time for lengthy research but thank goodness for Wikipedia.

By the end of the evening, which included a brief sojourn to the pub for a break and to figure out how to end the chapter, I’d written 4,000 words and completed the dreaded journal. I was quite light-headed.

And then the strangest thing happened: I became quite sad because, after 4,000 words of exposure, I quite liked Dr. William Henry Lansbury and, moreover, I was concerned about him and wanted to know how he would be. But in the story’s “now”, he is long dead. Gutted.

It will be curiously difficult today to get my 3rd-person narrator and main character voice back together.

I knew that journal chapter was cursed. Just didn’t expect it to be such a perverse one.

Tags: Grace Heaton and Silk, NaNoWriMo, Writing