NaNo Diary: Day Ten

I know I haven't posted the past few days. I've been writing, but that and everything else in my life just took up too much time to allow me to update my NaNo Diary here. I'm dealing with a great deal of personal stress and tension, problems that keep cropping up and have to be resolved, other things I need to do.

But, in spite of all that, my novel is doing well. I don't mean to suggest it is perfect. I've gone off the rails in a few places, and I'll need to clean things up quite a bit when I revise - but this is a first draft. I am not one of the rare writers who can put a flawless first draft down on paper. At least not usually, and the very rare times when I do, it is a poem or a very short story...

The point is that a few interesting twists have come up to enliven what I'd planned in the few days I managed to devote to that. The story and the characters are coming alive, and developing a certain momentum of their own. No matter how much cutting, patching, putting things back together, and otherwise rearranging I'll need to do in revision, I do at least have a story I think I can polish into something interesting.

And Dietrich Bonhoeffer hasn't even stepped into the story yet... Yes, he has a cameo in this alternate history. He sets my main character thinking along different lines. Anyway, if anyone is reading this, I know what you're waiting for is my current word count. As of tonight, I am up to 21,921 words!. For the first time ever, I have consistently been ahead of my goal from the very first day, and each day, my 'lead' keeps growing. By now, I am slightly more than three days ahead of target. I dare not grow complacent, but at least I'm not thousands of words behind - and my story is picking up steam, as I already said.