jadesfire

Well, that happened. Not only is this the longest I've ever sustained NaNo for, I've managed to break the 10K barrier! Woot! It's flowing well, and I've resigned myself to the fact that yes, this is going to be LONG, so I just have to deal with it.

The problem is that I plan by running the film version of the story in my head (complete with close ups and cutaways. My imagination is thorough), and then write down what's going on. But in the film version, scenes that are only two minutes long take several thousand words to write. So my estimates are always waaaaaaaay off, as they're based on the wrong version!

Still, I hope to get away under 40K (*insert laughter here*). IT COULD HAPPEN.

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10036 / 50000 words. 20% done!

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Extract:

Matt had been ready for it this time, the way all the energy lines in the room seemed to reroute themselves around Danny's body, drawing strength from somewhere that wasn't just inside himself. The power flowed through him and out through his hand, the strike loud enough that even with his awareness dialed back as far as he dared, Matt still winced.

The blast force was definitely smaller than before, only ruffling Matt's hair, and just enough to knock the Oweiran off his feet and a few meters back. Behind it, a ripple of muttering went through the chamber, lowering the general volume and shifting the atmosphere from leering to wary.

Pushing Matt in front of her, Colleen gestured for Danny to meet them halfway.

"Hang on to him," she said, then lifted her voice. "Anyone else?"

More muttering, but no one stepped up, and Colleen gave a small sound that might have been disappointment.

"Well, just let me know if anyone fancies it. Come on, Danny." As they made their way past the fallen body, Colleen sighed. "It's weird how no one ever wants a good match after they see that."

#1. Does anyone know how IFTTT works? I swear I've set it up right for crossposting, but the wretched thing refuses to work. Email posting works just fine, so I'm at a bit of a loss as to what I might be doing wrong. Bah.

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#2. OH GOOD LORD SO TIRED. I hate this time of year so much - with the clocks changing, and the days getting shorter, my brain just wants me to hibernate. Constantly.

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#3. Also not helped by trying out a new diet. Or, I should say, doing a crazy exclusion diet to try and tackle some of my various health issues. I put this on my other social media, which sort of explains it:

"As some of you know, I’ve been pretty ill over the last couple of years. I got a diagnosis of CFS + anxiety, but mostly that told me *how* I’m ill, not how to recover. It’s been frustrating, upsetting, embarrassing and lonely. The last couple of months have been the breaking a point, as pretty much everything I eat has been giving me debilitating IBS, which has been uncomfortable and humiliating. On that basis, I decided that food was probably a good place to start to try and recover. As I’m not good at following self-imposed rules, I’m using the Whole30 plan to work out what might be the worst culprits, and to get myself off my sugar addiction. Oh, and to massively reduce my caffeine intake, because it’s too easy to self-medicate with coffee when you have sleeping problems! So this is my food for the next week. It’s going to be a lot of work, and I apologise in advance if I am grumpy or vague if I see you. I may also be on here moaning a lot. But I am sick of being sick, and of missing out on life because of it. This isn’t a quick fix, and it’s not a cure. But I’m hoping it’s a first step."

I'm now on Day 5. It's actually not been too bad overall, which suggests I'm probably doing something wrong! The main side effect seems to be that I'm hungry all the time, no matter how much I eat, although given that's an average Wednesday for me, it's manageable. The general consensus is that things don't improve massively until Day 15 or so, so the main thing for the moment is to hang in there and resist the urge to just eat because I'm hungry. For anyone worrying, I'm eating PLENTY of food. The hungriness is a combination of reflux and cravings, and it's actually a lot easier to stick to this with it's absolutes than it has been to just generally eat more healthily.

But it's only Day 5. I'll report in 10 days how I'm doing!

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#4. Nano Day 2 went okay. Word count is up to 3644, so that's fine. Especially considering the original aim was 500 words a day! It felt a bit plodding at first, which is the normally the point at which I give up. It was a good exercise to force myself to keep going through the plodding to find the flow on the other side. As it's NaNo, naturally it needs MASSIVE editing, but I feel I'm getting the bones of the plot and the emotional beats down, so I'm happy so far.

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#5. Today's extract:

“Funny thing, Matty. We followed a Hand ship to Morag, figured they were after something important that might be worth having. And what do we find when we get here?”

“A bunch of unconscious idiots?”

“More or less. I mean, they were dead when we left them, but let’s go with your answer for now.”

It was probably a good thing Matt wasn’t holding the orb any more, because it left him free to clench his hands into fists.

Stick was still talking. “Except that’s not all we found. Or rather it’s what we didn’t find.”

“Look, Stick,” Matt said, letting himself sound about half as angry as he felt, “did you just call to be cryptic at me, or did you actually want something?”

“What I want is whatever was behind that forefield. And don’t give me any kind of crap about ‘what forcefield?’. This thing has got your prints all over it.”

Matt’s lips twitched. “Is this where I’m supposed to say 'but I was wearing gloves’?”