let's go see the chickens!

Nanowrimo is going pretty well. I'm clocked in at over 6,000 words right now, averaging about 3 pages a day. Now, that's nowhere near what I need to be writing to hit 50,000 words by the end of the month but I'm not really stressed about that. Writing this much this consistently isn't something I usually manage. Sometimes I'll have a day where I write ten pages but it's usually dry spells in between and it's learning to write through those times that this month is really helping me with. Hitting the 50,000 words would be cool, but there are other lessons and habits that I can pick up regardless of what my final word count is for the month.

That being said, for the most part writing has been pretty smooth sailing thus far. I had a pretty good idea of where things were going and what was happening next but now I've exhausted that [and my notebook along with it] and I've hit a slow period where not much is going on. I realized this rather abruptly on Tuesday and the question has been sitting in my brain since then: what do we do? My characters are stuck in a mandatory waiting period which could ultimately work well for pacing purposes or it might be best to do a literary "five weeks later" [did anyone else hear that in the SpongeBob narrator voice?] and jump to when things start happening again. The latter may be what I go with in revisions, who knows, but with the context of the quote I shared from Neil Gaiman last week I'm pushing forward to see what might become of this slower time. I'm trying to figure out what could be meaningful about it for the two characters who are currently able to do more than lie in bed.

Last night I decided to go see the chickens. The dialogue seemed to be stalling within the group so I thought, let's take a tour, and the first place we're going is to see the chickens. It's not the most exciting thing, though one has already scared the living daylights out of Kamdon - he may be scarred for life - but you have to start somewhere before your characters can tell you what they want to do. I think I might keep "let's go see the chickens" as my little mantra for situations like this where I have a sense of where the story is going, long-term, but not in the immediate present. It's just weird and funny enough for me to remember what it means and remember to loosen up a little in my planning.

Speaking of planning, flights have been rescheduled and Emily [from high school - I'm not referring to myself in third person] is coming out on the second week of December! I'm excited to hang out during the holiday season. It'll be cold, but hopefully pretty!

I've been watching Gilmore Girls for the first time since the whole thing is now available on Netflix. So, in closing, I will leave you with possibly my favorite scene thus far. The dialogue from this show plus cats? You can't lose.