Starting Week 2

Well I've completed week 1 with a mostly unqualified success. I had a couple of days where I failed to meet my goal of 1667 words, but I've always at least kept the running word total above what it needed to be for the day. You can largely ignore the "word widget" at the side of my blog. It should read 14,448 as of the date of this posting, but it's at least a couple of days behind. It took them over a month to even get it working, but it is apparently still not correct.

It's probably just the normal tricks of memory, but it seems like this story is resisting me a little more than the last two nano projects. This despite the fact that the story is already pretty much laid out for me. In some ways I've been living with this story for decades. Perhaps that's why this story feels more like a re-write than a discovery draft. Still, the only reason I even made goal tonight was because I already had the next scene well mapped out. At least I don't have to stare at a blinking cursor and wonder what comes next. I just have to figure out how I'm going to get to the next scene.

The big battle has just begun and Kennth Phon's (Xenephon) employer, the alien "Shines Like the Sun" (Cyrus the younger) looks to be winning. I've completely manufactured an incident in the battle (since the real Xenephon hardly mentions his role until after the disaster befalls them) that would be worthy of a good action movie's opening stunt. Let's hope I don't introduce any plot complications I'll later regret.