MyNoEdMo Redux Progress

A year ago, Juliette Kimball would have taken the train to work. Instead, she now sat at a railroad crossing and watched a long line of freight and cattle cars go rumbling by. She drummed her fingers on her Honda’s steering wheel in time with the ding-ding-ding of the train signal and marveled at the fact that this had become an unavoidable part of her morning commute. Claremore, Oklahoma was quadrisected by two sets of railroad tracks, the scheduling of which seemed to conspire so that no matter where Juliette was, or what time she left her starting point, she always got stuck on the wrong side of town whenever a train passed through.

This is currently the intro to project code name: Identity Crisis. I don't know if it'll stick -- it might turn out to just be a further exercise in character sketching. At any rate, I've got 502 words in addition to these 116. That doesn't really sound like much for 3 days' work, but I'm not really focusing on word count right now. My main goal is just to get into the habit of adding new words to the manuscript every day, even if it's just a handful.

So far I've managed to do that every night except last night. That's because I've reached a point in the book I'm currently reading (Peter Straub's Ghost Story) where it's difficult to think about much else. Tonight I'll probably finish the book, and then that will likely be the last novel I read until this manuscript is done. It's too easy to let other people's writing distract me from my own to try to handle both at once.

I'm also going to have to take a break from adding words over the weekend -- my tendonitis, or whatever undiagnosed thing is making my wrist hurt and my pinky go numb every time I type, has been flaring up a lot lately. I need to take a good, long break from computer activity to give it a chance to heal. But I still have outlining to do, and I'll probably spend my next two days' writing time on something akin to Holly Lisle's Notecard Plotting Method. If nothing else, that should keep my head in the story while I'm laid up.

Don't forget to see how Cynthia, Sean & Kim are doing!