NaNoWriMo is still sucking. I worked my ass off over the weekend, and for a brief while on Saturday night and Sunday morning, some of what I was writing actually started to feel like it didn't totally blow. But I'm still going too slowly, trying too hard to write well instead of just write. Which is dumb, because for all the time I'm spending trying to write something that doesn't suck, it still pretty much sucks, so I should have just blurted out the first thing that came into my head and moved on. Except that most of the time the first thing that comes into my head sounds like it was composed by a chimpanzee with a second-grade reading level, which is why I can't bear to write it down.

And then towards the end of the afternoon yesterday I started feeling really burned out. So now I'm in this "I hate this story, I hate these characters, I don't want to write about any of it anymore" place, which is so not cool.

I think part of my problem is that at this point I've written a lot of the scenes that were firmly in my head, and now I'm faced with the bits that I'm not exactly sure how to deal with--which is the price you pay for weaknesses in your outline. Plus--and this is really bothering me--the characters are not talking in my head! Dialogue has always been easiest part of writing for me--which is why I started out writing screenplays and had to work up my courage to attempt narrative fiction. Usually, when I'm writing something, the characters are constantly chattering at me and I can usually sit down and spit out a few pages of dialogue on pretty much any subject, which may not necessarily be usable, but can be a handy jumping-off point/brainstorming session when I get stuck. Now? Not so much. These damn people have nothing to say. Or, if they do, I have no idea how they'd say it. Obviously, it's time to suck it up and do some writing exercises. Oy.

Word count = 9500/50000

And, the munchkin's home sick today, not so much because she feels sick, but because she's developed a dry, barking cough so unrelenting that no one in her class would be able to concentrate if she were there. So, yeah, not a lot of writing time for me today. But I'm taking her to the doc in a bit, and then I'll spend the day doing some of the stuff that I've been putting off and letting slide around the house while I've been buried in my novel. And maybe I'll make some time to do some writing exercises, too. Steering the Craft, here I come.

On the bright side, I got to watch "Grey's Anatomy" last night, and GA is love. (And why the hell don't I have any GA icons? Must remedy that.) Why didn't I request a GA fic for the bubbleficathon? Oh, yeah, because I requested a "Bones" fic, which is also love. *hee* Oh, and I got my assignment from the lovely em_meredith and I am tres excited! To the point that I have a huge urge to start working on it right now, which would be all kinds of bad and wrong.

And speaking of allowing myself to become distracted by fic, I'm very tempted to sign up for elvenjen4's varietypack100. Someone stop me before I hurt myself.