Day 19 -- 10,028-- 57,991/Dancer 160,076 total

I have had three 10k days in a row. It's been a long time since I've done anything like that. Okay, the start of the month, but the first week of NaNo is always exceptional forme. later, though... I am usually fighting for 3 or 4k at this point.

I'm doing well -- at least for the NaNo stuff. I can't say the rest of my life is working as well, but I'll get back to it soon.

Sitting down and forcing yourself to write is difficult some days. Today was one of those for me. My mind kept leaping off into other things. I wanted to work on an article for Vision. I needed to answer emails or do some house cleaning. I managed to avoid almost all of those things. And I'm glad. It was Sunday. I wrote. All is well in the world.

And now I will sleep.

Snippet:

Dancer nodded. "We were talking about Earth Normal."

"Yes. Like I said, it can't apply to terra formed worlds, because none of them can ever be earth, no matter what flora and fauna -- the plants and animals -- the planners bring in. The things introduced to a new world always mutate. And the term means even less on a world like this, which was habitable from the start."

"If plants and animals mutate, what about the humans?"

"The higher up the evolutionary scale, the slower the rate of change," Cha answered.

Dancer nodded again. "But we are changing."

"Yes. I'm amazed that you caught on to what most people ignore. We began the change ourselves, and not just with leaving earth. It came with the first fifty years of the new regen drugs out of Terra Nova. It turned out that the drug did more than help heal wounds and help people recover from what had been deadly diseases. It also renewed tired cells. It was pervasive and worked into the DNA, and within one lifetime, life spans suddenly doubled. And there it stopped, having reached the limit of its own powers. But we all carry the new strand of regen DNA in our own makeup now, and pass it on to new generations, so everyone benefits from it."

"Is that why I've survived when I shouldn't have?"

"Some of it, probably," Cha agreed. "It was lucky that the regen drugs hit before we'd spread beyond the Centauri system and Terra Nova. And we're lucky that the scientists who found it turned out to be altruistic, rather than greedy. They were able to spread the regen out to everyone in those early years. And then the new birth control and the opening of new colonies saved us from a (something) in the birth rate. So we survived, and here we are."