NaNoWriMo Day 19: 29,060 words!

This morning I was getting ready for work and saw that today was the 19th.  Which means (yikes!) only 11 days until the end of National Novel Writing Month!  I managed to catch up a little over the weekend, which was good.  My writing session in Annapolis was shorter than I wanted it to be.  I spent a lot longer than I had expected looking over the Academy grounds.  So little has changed there in 21 years!

I've been doing some minimal sketching out of the plot and leaving un-written some of the passages that just serve to connect more interesting passages.  This is paying off.  The story is flowing along nicely.  I really understand what writers mean when they say that the book takes on a life of its own.  There have been several times when I've decided to take a character in a new and different direction only to find that details of the story up to that point support the change.  It feels like someone else is planning out the book for me.

This weekend I had dinner with my old Glee Club director from the Academy, Dr. John Barry Talley, and his wife, Marcia Talley.  We were talking with a group of other alumni from the glee club about a bar in Annapolis, and I found myself saying, "oh, thank god you know the name of that place, I'm using it in my book."  My book.  How very weird.  Marcia Talley is a renowned published writer, and she looked over at me and beamed proudly when I said that.