At the moment I have 15,000 words (however MS Word calculates such). Which means a)I’m on track for my revised schedule and b)I did 3500 words today. 3500 words is (at 250 per page) 14 pages, which means that mentally I am not at top form at the moment. Darin graciously took the kids all day so I could write.

Vomiting out a vast quantity of words produces strange side effects. One of the main ones at the moment is that I really, really want to write a potboiler. You know: one of those novels with glitzy settings filled with beautiful people wearing designer clothing and having sex a lot. (The über-example of the genre is Lace by Shirley Conran. The famous first line is “Which one of you bitches is my mother?” Which you have to admit would probably get you to read at least a paragraph or two.) I don’t know why I’d want to write a book like that; I don’t read them all that often, and when I do I’m invariably disappointed. Not sexy enough or not well-written enough or what I can’t tell you. Of course, quite possibly I can’t tell you because I may not have any words left in me at the moment.

(Let’s see. If I wanted to produce a 200,000 word doorstop every year and I took 50 weeks of the year to do it, that would be 4000 words a week or 800 words per weekday. At 250 words per page, that’s only 3 pages per day, with weekends off! Of course, you’re probably contracted to write more than that, which means pretty soon you’re farming out to subnovelists, and let’s not even think about rewrites.)

Anyhow, it’s enough for right now that I’m writing. And most of the time it’s fun, even though the Censor sits on my shoulder and says, “Good lord, this is awful, you know that, right?” and “Gosh, you wasted an awful lot of time outlining to no avail.” I try not to listen to that voice too often. I have too many words to write in the next 17 days.

Yeah, I’m one those utter loonies who has signed up to write a novel in 30 days in November. It’s called National Novel Writing Month and you agree to write 50,000 words in 30 days. 50,000 words is not a novel (seems to be more a novella, I think), but it’s a start.

Now, the completely insanity of this is I haven’t written any words of fiction at all in approximately 18 months. And I promised myself, after having written most of an entire draft of a novel that meandered and didn’t really have an ending that the next time I was going to have a rock-solid outline, by God. I was going to work out the story ahead of time, I was going to make sure that it worked, dammit, before I put one word on paper. You can take detours more easily when you already have the roadmap.

I do not have a finished outline. Hurrah.

I do have, however, 7200 words I didn’t have on October 31. And while I feel exceptionally out of shape writing-wise, it’s actually kind of fun to create again. I keep complaining to my friend Michele (the gadfly who insisted we start checking in with one another in order to keep ourselves on the straight and narrow, writing-wise) that what I’m writing for NaNoWriMo is utter shite.

But, you know: the best novel ever written is the one that’s still in someone’s mind. Putting it down on paper is the real trick.

You know that People for the American Way has published the Florida Felon List, which allows citizens to check to see if the state of Florida is calling them nasty names behind their back and, oh yes, disenfranchising them. Great move, props all around to PFAW.

I’m not here to get into the Florida thing. No, no: I’m here to tell all writers out here to get copies of the list immediately. Unfortunately, it’s 26 PDF files. On the other hand…it’s a gigantic list of names you can look at any time to spark an idea for a character’s name.

Need a name? Check the list. All different ethnicities and heritages. Easy to peruse in the comfort of your own computer.

I’m all about the writing help over here.