Ugh. Very unwell today. Fighting nausea, and I can’t seem to stand up straight.

I played duelling laptops with Ceri again yesterday, and I’m very glad we did. For one thing, writing was like pulling teeth, and I’d likely have given it up if she hadn’t been here. And for another, I gave her Chapter Four (entitled Death to Fluffy Bunnies) and I heard her laugh throughout it. This is the feedback every writer needs when s/he has hit a wall and is convinced that their prose is flat and the story uninteresting. t! calls this A Fan. When there’s someone who’s excited about your writing, and that person is not you, suddenly there’s more purpose to your writing life.

The obstacle I hit yesterday was a direct result of deviating merrily from the rough outline I created in the first week of November. Hey, things were flowing, so why interrupt them? You interrupt them and get them somewhat back on track because otherwise, you end up sending the story down an increasingly narrowing canyon until you end up in a dead end with your protagonist staring blankly at a stone wall somewhere around 25K.

So I dug out the outline, and by trying to explain the problem aloud to Ceri I saw all the ways to make it better. Sometimes, you just need a friendly ear, and someone who writes too and who will give you feedback on how not bad the words are that you’ve already put down.

And when I woke up after my unscheduled hour-and-a-half sick sort of nap this afternoon, I bashed out another 2K and leapfrogged Emily Horner again. Ha. (Actually, I thought I had done it yesterday as well, but when I logged on to the NaNo site to update my word count, she’d beaten me to it, damn her, so I had to do it all over again…) Emily is the other person keeping me writing this year. I’m so disillusioned with my story at the moment that I’m reduced to checking word counts and saying, “If I write just 1,673 more words, I’ll pass Emily again”, which is hardly the way to approach a creative project, but it keeps me at my laptop.

Current word count of Balsamic Moon: 30, 162