Mid (almost) NaNo Update

A Writer's Block is lucky that dust does not accumulate in cyber space. Poor neglected blog!

And the neglect only builds. I made the title a few days before the mid-point and am only coming back to finish the post now, a couple of days after. Here's a quick update before life pulls me away again.

I'm way behind on NaNo--16,000 words behind. I went to my second mini write-in (mini because it's just me and another newbie in our area) and they are helping to propel me forward. There is a chance, however slight, that I'll catch up and make goal.

My big "DAMN IT" happened right after the write-in. Since half of our meeting happened at the library, I took the time to return and pick up books. I've found that I can keep a certain balance, stories are great while I'm writing. If the story's good, it makes me want to write in celebration of it. If it's not good, it makes me want to write something I enjoy more. So long as I don't go unbalanced and read to the point of not writing, it's all good. So I cracked open C.E. Murphy's The Queen's Bastard knowing nothing but that it was a C.E. Murphy book so there was a significant chance that I would like it.

I cracked it open and was interested immediately. I only had time for a page or so, then I flipped it over to finally find out what it was about. And there was a pet character of mine that I kept promising I'd write about when I finished other projects.

Oh, she's not MY character. Murphy didn't hack my locked LiveJournal entries and steal my ideas. It's just a horrible, disheartening coincidence that, save her character being the bastard of a queen and mine the bastard of king and whose sister is the monarch she serves, the characters are eerily similar and Murphy--at least at first glance--did it better than I probably would.

Let that be a lesson to those of us who would start are careers someday. All these nifty ideas seem to be floating in the ether, and if we keep putting it off, some brave and talented writer will beat us to the punch.