Closing in on the halfway mark for NaNoWriMo already!  I’ve been running at a deficit ever since political results came in, but the muse, temporarily scared off, seems to have largely returned.  I kept the deficit fairly low, and have now managed to catch back up again this weekend.

I’m hitting some new challenges on the writing front–I was expecting all along that the writing would get easier once I got to the final, more plot-driven section of the book.  Well, I’m there now, and have discovered a new complexity.

You see, when I saw I had a partial draft before NaNo, it wasn’t quite as simple as, say, having written chapters 1-30 and needing the last ten.  I’ve been writing most of this out of order, so it’s more like I wrote the first thirty chapters, had a multi-chapter gap, and then had portions of the final few chapters.  I’ve filled in the gap and am into those final few (which still stretch over a lot of scenes and words).  Now I need to connect things up and fill in missing pieces…and it’s harder to get the word count that way.

I can write a lot of words quickly if I can get into a scene and just tear right through it.  Completing a partial scene or writing transitions between scenes are smaller chunks and it’s harder to get momentum up.

On the other hand…I get to move forward through the book in leaps and bounds since entire scenes are already here.  And I feel that I’m really finally getting down near the end–which is exciting and alarming!  But more exciting. 🙂

Have an excerpt!

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Everything was perfectly fine and I was perfectly happy and I was perfectly, perfectly content without Erik at all.  Or so I kept telling myself.

Likewise I tried to tell myself that the ongoing chatter of the ballet girls was not irritating, as we sat in the changing rooms, waiting to be called.  They were distracting.  That was good.

“Tell us more about your dinner with Leon,” Adalisa said eagerly, and the three other girls sitting in our little circle chimed agreement.  “He really is so handsome.”

“Yes,” I agreed.  He was that.  And he had grown suddenly very attentive.  Ever since we had gone into Box Seven and…well anyway, I was enjoying my time with him.  And it wasn’t as though I was so busy with anyone—anything else anymore.

“Do you suppose that he—” Gabriella began, and then suddenly gave a shriek.  She leaped away, pointing behind me, and for one sickening moment I thought perhaps Erik had thrown away the protection of being dead and decided to come looming out of my mirror.

But when I turned, all that was there was a very large spider, standing on top of my dressing table.  “Oh not this again,” I groaned, as the girls went through their customary cries over the spider.

I was positive that half these girls didn’t really mind spiders this much; they just started shrieking because everyone else set them off.

Everyone around me had backed quickly away, and more girls were rising to their feet as they realized what was going on.

“It’s just a spider,” I said, reaching for an empty glass to trap it with.

And then all the lights in the room went out.

“It’s the Phantom!” one girl screamed, only to be quickly corrected by a remarkably calm, “No, silly, the Phantom died, remember?”

“Maybe it’s his ghost,” someone else suggested.

“Or maybe it’s just the electricity acting up.”

“Oh.  Well that’s boring.”