The Words: 2977 words total for the day.

I did a 20-minute sprint with my daughter this afternoon, which gave me 1/3 of the words I needed for my daily goal (3000) and also tipped me over to saying that I write the most between 3pm and 4pm.

That’s definitely new for me, because for years, I’ve written mostly at night, somewhere between 9pm and midnight. But this reflects how much I’ve been doing sprints with my daughter, which we’re most likely to do in the afternoon or in the evening before she goes to bed.

Then she went to go play a board game with her dad, and I did a couple of sprints with the @NaNoWordSprints Twitter feed, the second of which I stopped at the halfway point, because I had finished the first storyline of the draft and didn’t want to dive into the next one mid-sprint.

The Story: The rest of the first storyline (of 4) in this draft went by in a whoosh today. That’s because I finally got to the big battle that the book centers around, but the battle isn’t shown in any detail for this storyline. It’s really only shown through a few letters between some of the main characters.

Then I came up to the final scene of the storyline. I’ve had this scene in my head for around 11 years, and I finally got to write it. And it was perfect. Not that it won’t need any revising, but the experience of writing it was just incredible.

I never used to be one for music while I was writing, as much because I didn’t know what kind of music to listen to as anything. In recent years, though, I’ve found that I like having music playing while I write. These days it’s usually some sort of World of Warcraft music, because let’s face it, it has music for every mood. But earlier this month, I realized that there was much better music for this particular quarter of the story–music from the BBC miniseries North and South. I specifically chose to play Northbound Train during that scene, and it was perfect. It even swelled at the exact right time. I honestly don’t know if I’d have had the same feelings if the music hadn’t been there, but all of it together had me in tears while I wrote the scene. I love those moments in writing.

I had to take a break after that, figuring I’d start into storyline #2 later in the evening. But now I’ve decided to just let it rest for today and start new tomorrow.

Total word count: 33,708

If you want to join me in my journey through the first year of NaNoToons (with a storyline), check out the NaNoToon from November 12, 2010!

And if the week 2 blahs have got you down (or even if they don’t), it’s a good time to check out the 3rd episode of the NaNoMusical!