Greetings from the trenches of NaNoWriMo!  We’ve finished out the first week, and so far things are going along well.  My word count stands at 17,110, which puts me well above the official goal of 13,336 for Day 8.  But next week is going to be much busier, so I expect to need that cushion!

As I expected, Wednesday and Thursday of last week gave me less writing time, though I managed 1,200 words on Wednesday and 800 on Thursday.  Along with the time constraint, the muse was not smiling so much.  I knew what the scenes needed to be, but they were coming out rough.  All of NaNo writing (and all first drafts) is expected to be rough to a point, but I feel good about my first 10,000 words…and then the next few thousand are going to need heavier revision later on.  But, I realized I have the wrong point of view for one of those scenes, so at least I have some idea where to start revising!

Friday continued the slumpy writing for 1,000 words or so…then picked up in the next 1,000, so I hope I’m over the sticking place–at least, this one!  There will probably be others.  So far, today’s been going better, both word count and quality.

But enough about numbers, how is the story developing?  Pretty good, on the whole!

The villains, who have largely been murky and shadowed, are starting to emerge–including the fact that there are three of them, not the two I expected.

I briefly worried that the hero and heroine weren’t going to hit it off–and then they started sparking, so I think that’s going to be all right.  I thought they were just arguing, and suddenly they decide they’re having fun.  Who knew?  Well, they were having fun until Forrest suddenly said the wrong thing and Karina got mad at him.  But that was good development too, and let me set up the next piece of magic run amok.  You might be able to guess from the excerpt below!

And…I thought of a way my Good Fairy can be to blame for a massive amount of trouble, which is always a good thing. 🙂

Next plans?  More words!  For now, excerpt:

Karina was standing by the horse’s stall, and Millie had thrust her head over the low wall to be patted. Millie liked absolutely everyone so that wasn’t surprising. It took him more by surprise that Karina was apparently being friendly back. She had her face close to Millie’s and was rubbing the soft spot on her nose. The defiant set of her shoulders had relaxed.

He watched for a long moment before he noticed he was doing it. When he noticed, he cleared his throat and said, “Nothing to see out here, I’m going back for breakfast.”

She looked away slowly, blinked at him once, and then her shoulders squared again. Maybe a little less adamantly than before though. “I like horses,” she said, reaching up to rub once between Millie’s ears. Then the corner of her mouth quirked up just the tiniest bit. “They don’t say stupid things.”

“They might if they could talk,” he pointed out.

“Maybe so,” she agreed.