Day 21 – Breaktime
38,633/50,000
So what with packing, and hanging out with my family, and eating lots of good food, not much novelling got done today at all. -facepalm- I don’t know how much I can do on holiday, so I’m just going to write as much as I can, but not pressurise myself too much to finish it before December 1 (I am, first and foremost, on vacation). Finishing the 50,000 words is a bigger goal for me at the moment than the timeline… so no matter what, I will get there! Even if I have to eat a little into December.
In the meantime, some last excerpts before I take off tomorrow morning for 10 days! And good long hefty ones too to make up for the lack of posting lately.
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Tags: day 21, excerpt, prufrock
Day 20 – Mini-update
38,363/50,000
In a fit of madness, I decided to make myself stay up as late as I possibly could without my head exploding, and to just keep churning out words without paying much heed to whether they made sense, which has added another 1,000+ to my total!
I’m beginning to think though that, realistically, if I want to go on holiday with my sanity intact, I won’t be able to hit 50K before I leave. I do think I may well be able to handwrite enough to hit 50K on the road, but I don’t know if I’ll be able to upload it before the clock hits midnight Nov 31 and the validation window closes :/
Well – even if I don’t manage to finish in time, or finish in time to be an official winner, it will have been worth it and at least I fought hard. We will see. 
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Day 20 – Consolidation
37,293/50,000
So the dreaded days of intercontinental travel came and went, and as suspected, they have royally messed with my ability to write. I feel like I am so close that I have to finish this now or I shall forever be mad with myself, but at the same time… this jetlag is really getting to me.
I managed to handwrite a good amount while travelling, and I haven’t finished typing it all up yet – which is good. I do on the other hand have a grand total of one day left to finish this before heading off on holiday, which… will be very difficult, to say the least, and will probably involve an acute shortage of sleep. But hey. Onwards and upwards. If I can’t finish it, I’ll just handwrite on holiday, and keep my fingers crossed that I manage to type it all up somewhere along the way and upload it before December 1…!
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Tags: day 20
Day 17 – Heirlooms?
34,089/50,000
It does actually get easier once you’re past 30,000! It’s not a NaNo myth after all! I’m trying to think of it in blocks of 1,000 words, and considering that there are only 16 more blocks to go, and I can churn out 1,000+ words (or questionable quality, admittedly) in about an hour, give or take, all I need is a few hours a day to sprint to the finish. My computer-less holiday is drawing pressingly close, but… I think it’ll be all right.
Last of the Polly and Eve excerpts for a while. They speak to a bookstore owner, and get some hopefully helpful information.
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Tags: day 17, eve, excerpt, polly
Day 17 – Cecil Court
32,650/50,000
I missed an update yesterday! That’s how tired I was after cooking dinner, talking to my dad, doing some packing, clearing my fridge by literally tossing all the bakeable ingredients together into a tray, sticking it into the oven and hoping for the best, and then banging out another 600 words before bed.
Anyway, I haven’t started writing yet this morning, but have an excerpt to make up for yesterday’s lack thereof. I’ll post another after this morning’s writing sprint. Cecil Court is as accurately described as I can glean, from internet research – despite the real thing being a short Tube ride away from me, I have yet to spend a lot of time there, rather shamefully!
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Tags: day 17, eve, excerpt, polly
Day 15 – Family history
31,045/50,000
Past 30,000! Yay!
I am quite pleased with today’s progress… I think I have made up quite a bit of ground. I’ll have a whole lot more to make up in the coming two days though, as I will be losing an entire day on the 18th while I fly back home – and I am not bringing my laptop back with me, as I plan to buy a new one when I’m home. Which means any writing I do at the airport or on the plane will have to be on paper. Joy! (I do have a fat writing notebook ready to go but I’m terrible at writing on paper, so I’m not hopeful… though it will probably help with the ‘write first, edit later’ mentality if I can’t hit backspace on paper).
More Polly and Eve – this is a monster section that I want to get out of the way, so it will be Polly and Eve for this post and the next at least, and maybe the one after too. I’m expending a lot of time (and numerous words) describing their day in detail, but I kinda want them to see some actual action soon 
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Tags: day 15, eve, excerpt, polly
28,397/50,000
I am sneaking this late, exactly 53 minutes after midnight on the 15th. I blame this on a tiring afternoon of errand-running (who knew there were so many things to take care of before going on holiday? Why can’t I just up and go, I say?), and a sudden desire to bake to eliminate stress and give me something to snack on while I hunker down to write. This then became nearly 3 hours spent baking snickerdoodles; I had been lulled into complacency by the ease of the recipe and had forgotten to note the fact that it yielded a prodigious number of cookies, which took a VERY long time and many, many, many, many batches in my tiny oven.
The end result of this all is, I am inching up on 30K (w00t!), and I now have more snickerdoodles than is humanly possible for one person to finish.
Also, because I am a few days behind in posting excerpts, I now have a nice big buffer of stuff to post… i.e. my writing is a few days ahead of my posting. Hopefully this means that I will be able to post more regularly and frequently.
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Tags: day 14, eve, excerpt, polly
Day 13 – Quick update
26,685/50,000
Plodding right along…
Sorry I never got round to posting yesterday’s excerpt (and will have to disappoint you further by not posting it today). I got REALLY insanely busy this week. I personally think that given the number of things which suddenly appeared on my plate, it is a miracle that I still managed to bang out 999 words this morning (how sad is it that I was too tired to add a couple more to bring it to >1000?).
Fortunately, the weekend approaches, hopefully bringing with it plenty of writing time!
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Tags: day 14
Day 12 – Morning
25,264/50,000
I AM PAST THE HALFWAY MARK.
That is all for now 
Excerpt later!
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Day 11 – Inching onwards
24,171/50,000
The writing is just not happening this morning. Very sleepy, and my mind keeps blanking out. But I am definitely going to hit 25K today, by hook or by crook! In the meantime, back to Prufrock and his various agonies.
(An interesting bit of trivia: it actually was raining on 2 October 1851. The weather is historically accurate. So is the fact that in spite of the rain, a ridiculous number of people turned up for the Great Exhibition anyway, getting soaked. Crowd mentality never changes.)
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Tags: day 11, excerpt, prufrock
