Day 8: 5,479 (87,334 Total)

Yes, a good drop in word count there. But a good set of pages, despite that I didn't get to work as much as I wanted. You can expect most of the rest of my NaNo days to run about this much now.

And here's a little tiny snippet from today, which I almost forgot to post before I went to bed!

Cats are surprisingly good about keeping their word, once you pry it out of them. I didn't worry about those two. I did block off the rest of the store, though.

Tim picked up George and draped him across his shoulders, like a live scarf.

"You're going to spoil him, you know," I said.

"I know," they chorused.

I shook my head as they both laughed. The two might be a problem, but right now they helped to lighten my mood again. I looked at the clock as we slipped out of the building. Nearly midnight, the point where magic would be it's strongest. Well fine. It worked that way for me, too.

Glittering shells around buildings looked almost real. I could sometimes make out windows and doors. The riders looked more real too, and I could hear them speak to each other sometimes -- not a language I knew. The horses even left prints in the snow now. The three of us moved silently through the town. The snow had stopped falling, but clouds still obscured the sky and I suspected it would start up again before sunrise.

Because the riders had become more real they actually proved easier to avoid. We could hear them coming, and while we had a couple close calls, we did manage to avoid being seen and caught.

The three of us made it all the way to the curve in the road and the incline on which the hotel sat.

And there we stopped.

"You know they might have mentioned the problem with the riders," I said -- and very, very softly.

The riders we'd seen in town were obviously just guards doing their rounds. We'd just found the army encampment. Tim and I backed up and it looked as though George tried to bury himself in Tim's collar to go unnoticed.