What do you mean only 2 days left?

I posted this on NaNo, and then realized it really belonged here on my blog. Which I had forgotten existed -- but I had reason. It's been a busy couple weeks, and not much of it good!

Well, this month has certainly gone fast. A bit too fast for me.

I had five days -- from the 18th to the 22nd -- that were barely 500 words each because of a convention. The convention was great fun, and I'm glad I went, but....

I injured my leg and couldn't sit at the computer for more than a few hours from the time we got home on the 22nd until early the 27th. I worked with my PDA in bed and managed about 1000 words or so a day, but the medications kept knocking me out.

Then, just as I was getting better one of my cats (Pip for those who know me) got seriously ill and required emergency trips to the vet. Russ and I sat up with him for the entire night. I didn't get a lot written.

And during all of this was faced with the increasing realization that I just didn't like a basic part of my second NaNo novel, and needed to rethink it. So I started doing that, writing out what is supposed to happen next in a kind of long rambling present tense prose. My storyline can stay basically the same even if I change one part of the premise.

Suddenly playing with the basics of a novel I'm supposed to be writing slowed me up as well.

And then last night -- a breakthrough. If Darkness Falls changes from the last of humanity to just a portion of humanity lost and settled on another world, then I can have a later meeting between lost humans and humans from Earth. It appealed to me, so I jumped a few generations into the future and wrote a scene. It was fun. Needs drastic work, but....

And then I had another thought. If I've skipped several generations for the lost humans, there would be time to slip in a story about the humans who were not lost and how the war that is part of the reunion scene starts up... and didn't I find an old notebook filled with the timeline and notes on my Inner Worlds Council history when I was cleaning out some boxes last month?

So I went hunting for it. Found some stuff. Started typing.

So, what had been a single story about the last (or the lost) humans settling on a very strange world has taken a different turn and is now three tales of intersecting families down through the ages. Descendents from the characters in the first part (Darkness Falls) will later encounter descendents from the characters in the second part (not titled) in the third part (Reunion).

Only now there's less than two days to write the rest of this. I would like to have the entire book finished. I'm not certain I can do it.

But at least I can finally mostly sit for a while and write.

I think that eventually this three part story might even expand into a trilogy of some sort. It's hard to say at this point. But I'm going to go get some writing done and see if I can get an entire first draft of the second book finished before the end of NaNo. That's my goal.