Thursday,
November 1, 2001

Aaaaaaaand we're OFF!

Daily word count: 1,840

Word count for the month: 1,840

And so it begins.

First day of NaNoWriMo, and I'm already 1,840 words up, with the promise of more to come at lunch -- whee!

So far, it all looks good -- I've been going back and forth between the story itself and my outline, so I actually have a roadmap of sorts to follow on A PREPONDERANCE OF PYRAMIDS. And for those interested in the story: disgraced historian and unwilling psychic David McClennan is drawn into a plot by the ancient, very dead but still extremely evil Egyptian queen Amunecket to return to this plane and wreak havoc upon the world via the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex. Can David, skeptical assistant museum curator Severna Clark, grizzled writer/biker Andrew Taggert, the assorted might of the SCA and an R&B band from Monroe, Michigan stop Amunecket and her new cronies the Southern Baptist Convention from taking over the world?

Check back with me at the end of November to see. In the meantime, since I am an incredible show-off, here's my first paragraph:

It was raining when the minivan chugged off U.S. Highway 75 near McKinney, TX. After dodging around a blue Passat station wagon that seemed to take the presence of other cars on the service road as a personal insult, the minivan driver angled for a Texaco station that looked like it had been dropped next to the highway from a great height, and without benefit of a wicked witch as an airbag. However, it was the only gas station he'd seen for some time, and the minivan's fuel gauge was well past E now and somewhere around "fumes." The driver had been to Texas before, and knew that being stranded on the side of the road during a rainstorm was equivalent to painting a sign on the back bumper that said "Aim Here."

I'm so proud. . .

Of course, things are not all rosy in the garden. What really hacks me off is that I'm going down to the Texas RenFest this weekend, and was going to write on this nice second-hand Palm III that a friend sold me. Unfortunately, I was having a moderately stressful day today and managed to drop the Palm III in the parking garage, and now it's not working. I haven't even paid for this bloody thing yet, and I already broke the damn thing.

I'm having one of those lives, it seems. . .