Hangin' Out the Van at High Speed

November 6, 2012 by Cassidy Frazee | 4 Comments

Yesterday . . . what can I say?  Well, I could say it sucked, but that would be unfair.  The day didn’t suck, but I sure felt like I sucked.

It was a day of big-time headaches, and there were a few times when I was almost yelling due to the pain.  I mean, remember Tony Dogs gettin’ his head put in a vice in the movie Casino?  I felt a little like that, only my eye didn’t pop out of my head.

Brutal, I’ll tell you.

But, just like the time I was turned into a newt, I got better.  By night time I didn’t feel that bad.  If anything, by the time I went to bed, I felt like I was doing pretty well.  But during the day–no.  Not feeling good.

However . . . I kept writing.

I wasn’t blazing through the story as I have been.  In fact, it was a real struggle.  I think some of the headaches are coming from having to copy street names found in Makassar.  Here is my document notes for the chapter I finished last night:

From the square at Jalan Pasar Cidu and Jalan Tinumbu, down Jalan Lamuru to Jalan Mesjid Raya, to Jalan Jenderal Urip Sumoharjo, on to Jalan Perintis Kemerdekaan, to a road past Rumah Sakit Bersalin Daya Grasia Hospital.

Ya got that?  You spend part of the day typing “Sumoharjo”, and your head is gonna hurt, too.

It was an interesting chapter, though.  I had my main character chasing another van that was being driven by . . . no one.  Ooooooh, spooky.  Really, they not only chased it, but they managed to get next to it, and one of the characters decided she needed really good video of no one driving a van, so I had her hanging out of her window for about a half a kilometer.

I liked the scene.  I could see everything in my head, and the flowed nicely.  The chapter ended up running four thousand, three hundred fifty words, which was a good run, and my biggest chapter yet.  I know I’ll have a few more that will be this big, and a couple will even be larger.  When I run the numbers, Nate Silver Style, I find that the story is inching toward fifty-nine thousand words, which is the goal I’m aiming towards.

Thing are going according to plan–yessssss.

I’m actually a bit surprised that the story is going well.  There was some concern before NaNo that I wasn’t going to have enough of a story to fill out sixty thousand words.  But that doesn’t seem to be the case now.  I know where I have ahead of me, and when I look at the places where the novel is going to stretch out a bit, I see that sixty thousand isn’t going to be a problem.  I’m actually thinking that sixty-five thousand isn’t out of the possibility of reality, either.  But I’m not going to count my words before they are written.

Just let them come, one at a time, and the story will end when it’s time.

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