NaNoWriMo: Time Is Running Out

Only a few days left - a few hours, really - until the deadline for NaNoWriMo hits, and I've still got nearly 17,000 words to complete. Time is running out. It feels like an episode of 24. If, you know, it was an episode of 24 that mainly concentrated on a man with scruffy hair and glasses hunched over a laptop. Now, I know that there are episodes that feature exactly that character, but they usually turn out to be one of the terrorists, and end up having all their fingers snapped backward by Kiefer Sutherland, and I don't want that happening before the end of the week. Of, indeed, ever.

I try and knock out a few hundred words while on my tea and lunch break at work. This morning, I fired up the PC, slotted in my memory card with the story on it .... and everywhere plunged into darkness. Now, that really was like an episode of 24. There had been some kind of major power cut in the town, but annoyingly, it wasn't major enough to facilitate everyone getting a day off. In fact, the power came back on roughly twenty minutes later. You know, at the end of my tea break. So I'd missed a chance that I really couldn't afford to miss to add a couple of hundred onto my word count, but I decided that I would appease the inspiration Gods by writing a power cut into my story. It'll actually work quite well, I think, and might even give me a couple of thousand extra words to slot into the climax. We shall see. At this point, every paragraph counts.

As I hurtle towards the finish line, mindful of the fact that most of my nights are going to be taken up with other activities (Ghostwalk tomorrow night, kids), what's interesting is the way a lot of people who know that I've taken on this ridiculous task have chosen to display their support. In the main, it involves them shrugging their shoulders, and beginning sentences with the words 'Well, of course, now, it's impossible ..', with the implication that no matter what happens now, there's no way that I'm going to be able to finish a 50k novel by the end of the week. The tone is pleasant enough (you know, 'nice try', and all), but I somewhat wish they'd at least wait until I actually came up short before telling me that it's ok that I've come up short.

Unless, of course, it's reverse psychology. Maybe they want me to take umbrage, to prove their expectation of my lethargy wrong. In which case, I resent being played so obviously. I've half a mind to simply stop writing, just to show everybody that I'm not so easily manipulated. Yes, that's the plan. Anyone can write a novel in a month. But it shows real strength of character to resist doing what everyone else on social networking sites is doing.

Oh, by the way, Facebook don't have any legal access to your status updates. Or something. Pass it on.