Today’s mission was to get my motorcycle ready to put into storage for the winter. That means being able to ride it to the friend’s house who is going to be able to store it. I haven’t been able to ride for most of his year because of some medical problems I’ve had to deal with this year. I had been keeping my battery on a charger, but sometime during the year the charger seems to have died. This also meant that I’ve had to get a new battery because the old one doesn’t seem to be able to hold a charge. I’ve no idea if the battery is ruined or not. I’ll have to be able to charge it up first.
So this morning’s first order of business was to go get the new battery. At least it was until I got in my car and the electrical system died. I managed to jigger it into working long enough to head over to the dealership. Good news is that it is covered under warranty and I have a loaner car. Bad news is they won’t be able to diagnose the problem until Monday at the earliest.
But I did get my writing in today! I kept plugging at things and added 2615 words to my story, bringing the total word count up to 31,870 words, putting me slightly ahead of where I should be. My target from here on out is 2000 words a day so I can finish early. Or at least hit 50,000 early. This story seems like it going to run more than 50,000 words. I suspect I won’t finish the first draft until sometime in December.
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Tagged as:
Crackle & Bang,
Steampunk,
WIP,
Writing
This morning, I was so exhausted I called in sick and slept in until around noon. Maybe later. I knew I had a lot that I needed to get done, but I had a really difficult time getting myself started. Then this evening we had to finish getting the rental truck unloaded into our storage locker and they return the rental truck. It wasn’t until after dinner that I finally got to sit down to start writing, and by then it was after 11 PM. But I decided to get some words in anyway rather than taking another zero word day to catch up to. I managed to crank out another 841 words, bringing my total up to 29,255. I need to put in a full day’s writing tomorrow and Sunday. This is the first time I’ve fallen behind the target curve and I really want to put in the extra effort to catch up. I am not going to let NaNoWriMo beat me!
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Tagged as:
Crackle & Bang,
Killer Clockwork Budgies of Doom!,
Steampunk,
WIP,
Writing
The last few days have been pretty busy. On the 15th, we spent the afternoon packing up furniture in Georgia. I tried writing, but I was so tired after the day’s exertions, I barely cleared 1000 words. On the 16th, we drove back to Maryland with our truck filled with my inheritance. I was able to write along the way and added 2018 words to my novel during the course of the 13 hour trip. Today, I went back to work. After working for a full day, my wife and I got started unpacking the truck. We got most of the furniture out, but still have some of the bigger pieces to unload. Tried to write tonight, but I am feeling drained again. I finally managed to clear 1023 words for today, but I’m pretty much done in. At least I’m ahead of the curve.
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Tagged as:
Crackle & Bang,
Killer Clockwork Budgies of Doom!,
Steampunk,
WIP,
Writing
Just got home after traveling all day. Too tired for a proper update. Today wrote 2018 words while traveling. Total word count is now up to 27,391. Details later.
Tagged as:
Crackle & Bang,
Steampunk,
WIP,
Writing
After saying farewell to all of our friends at the Carolina Renaissance Festival this morning, and picking up our rental car, my wife and I drove down to Georgia for the beginnings of our viking raid. The plan had been for me to write while she drove. She usually enjoys doing most of the driving. But less than an hour into the drive, her eyes started trying to close and she needed me to drive. I had written around 400 words, so I agreed to take a shift at driving. Once we switched places, she pretty much sacked out for the rest of the trip and I drove the rest of the way down to my brother’s house. Once we got the car unpacked, I was able to sit down and do some writing. I got the daily count up to 2088, bringing the overall total up to 24,300. Just shy of half way.
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Tagged as:
Carolina Renaissance Festival,
Crackle & Bang,
Steampunk,
WIP,
Writing
Well. Let’s face it. This isn’t going to be a sparkling NaNoWriMo post. Two days and no words written. At all. Of course, the reason for that is a good one. We attended the Carolina Renaissance Festival to pay homage to some fallen friends that we lost in the past year. In the process, we celebrated their lives by having more fun, and by discovering new family and making new connections that would not have been possible without the friends that we had lost.
Writing will continue later today.
Tagged as:
Carolina Renaissance Festival,
Friends,
Writing
Today’s adventure was the trip south to Charlotte, North Carolina and the Carolina Renaissance Festival. That meant loading everything up in the car and the first test run of my mobile writing platform. My setup consists of my iPad 2 running Plain Text, and a bluetooth keyboard. Nice, sweet and simple. The biggest drawback is the lack of a way to mount the iPad so that it stays upright where I can easily see it during the drive. And no, I’m not the one driving. But other that that difficulty, it worked like a charm. Plain Text syncs via Dropbox to put the words I’ve written on the road back onto my laptop, and then Scrivener syncs them back into my master manuscript. The other drawback that the system has is that I can’t see how many words I’ve written until I sync the words back into Scrivener. I managed to write 1998 words while out on the road today, so when I did my sync up, I wrote a few more paragraphs to round things out at 2148 words for the day. Now my novel is 44% complete, with 22212 words written.
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Tagged as:
Crackle & Bang,
Steampunk,
WIP,
Writing
Chaotic day today. Spent most of the day packing and getting ready for our trip down to the Carolina Renaissance Festival and our Viking Raid on points south. Unfortunately for me, this also meant a trip back into my work because I’d neglected to turn in my time sheet the day before. Time sheets go in on Wednesday of next week, the day we’re driving back from Atlanta. So my choice was either don’t get paid or take a run back in. Getting into work while rush hour was busy taking everyone away from work should have been easy. It wasn’t. Traffic was horrendous, and for some reason my GPS kept trying to steer me back into the one stretch of road I knew was at a complete standstill. After much driving around in circles, and a fair bit of driving off into the darkness not knowing where I was going I managed to arrive. Something like three hours of driving, for a 10 minute errand. Yuck. After a late dinner, I finally got a chance to sit down and start writing. It wasn’t a very productive day, but I did get some words down. Not quite my target 2000 words, but I did get 1771 more words written, taking my accumulated total over 20,000 words!
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Tagged as:
Crackle & Bang,
Steampunk,
WIP,
Writing
After grabbing a couple of hours of sleep, I was able to get up and get myself into work today, so a big chunk of my potential writing time was taken up with gainful employment (What Robert Heinlein used to refer to as “honest work”. Something to be avoided at all costs.). My time after work was somewhat fragmented. First my wife and I had to go inspect a potential storage space in which to store the loot from our upcoming “viking raid” of Atlanta. Then, after we finally located a suitable space that we can actually afford, we grabbed a quick dinner and made our way home. We ate dinner and started to pack for our raiding party… and I passed out. Clean knock out, down for the entire count. no words written at all. So for NaNoWriMo, the day was a washout.
Hopefully I do better on the 10th!
Tagged as:
Crackle & Bang,
Steampunk,
WIP,
Writing
I woke up sick this morning and ended up calling in to work. Then I slept in until something like 1 PM, soaked in sweat. Apparently I spiked a pretty high fever over night. It took me a while to get my brain in order to write, but you can’t exactly call in sick to NaNoWriMo. It just moves on without you! When I finally sat down to write, my progress was slow. It wasn’t until I got over my daily minimum that I started to get on a roll. By that time it was late enough that I wanted to find a place to stop, but each scene kept demanding to be finished. By the time I finally wound down, I had racked up another 2533 words, bringing my grand total up to 18293.
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Tagged as:
Crackle & Bang,
Steampunk,
WIP,
Writing
