NaNoWriMo, Day 10: Cruising On Ambrosia

A true luxury today. After my haircut, I headed over to Café Ambrosia, where I had almost two hours of uninterrupted time with the novel to get my word count back in the vicinity of being on target. It's a fairly new café in Evanston, and I'd heard someone on the NaNoWriMo boards talk about how once you checked it out, you wouldn't want to go to any other café in the area.

It's very spacious, with lots of different sitting options: The counter along the window, the counter inside, couches, comfy easy-chairs, and your traditional small-table-and-wood-chair. Which is what I opted for, along with my large caffé mocha.

First order of business: some house cleaning. It seems that in the course of these first ten days of writing, my plot and some characters (in typical fashion) have headed off in directions I hadn't expected. So rather than whip them into shape, I spent some time altering my plot outline, making it conform to where they've gone.

Then I wrote the second letter from Walt's mother to him. These were the sections of the novel I was most looking forward to, but since the loss of the notebook, these sections have become the most cumbersome to write. The letters provide the backstory to where Walt came from, what he is so desperate to escape. I don't feel like this material has come back so very well. Which is to say at all. I lumbered through the letter, but I feel like it's biding time. Maybe this is going to be fleshed out in the second draft.

One of the things I realized was that I had totally missed in my first draft of the earlier chapters was any explanation of how my main character got set up in his apartment. I mean, this first section of the story is about his starting over, so I feel I need to detail that process to some extent. So I found myself breaking a chapter into two pieces and inserting another chapter in between. And then I started writing that chapter. Of course, who should show up almost immediately in this new chapter? The female character who apparently desperately wants to sleep with Walt. (So, this rearrangement was her idea!) We'll see where that goes. I'm suspicious of her — not only her intentions for my main character, but her intentions in my novel. Still, if every character needs to want something, as Kurt Vonnegut suggests, then she has the most clearly defined want of anyone.

I ended up knocking out almost 2,000 words this afternoon. And there was this one transcendant moment when a particular song came on my iTunes: Seal's "Violet." I have no idea what happened, but in the course of that 8-1/2 minute song, over 400 words flew out of my fingers. Damn, was that nice.

I would love to get another two hours like this on Sunday, but I feel guilty about asking Laura to once again watch the kids. Especially when it feels like the house and the yard is getting crazier and crazier, and when we're hosting Thanksgiving in a mere eleven days.