Nano Novel: FREE fiction

Okay, so another NaNoWriMo award merely qualifies me as a hack (which is, let’s face it, a higher honor than a pedestrian or closet scribbler - someone with aspirations to ‘one day’ write), but I earned this one BIGTIME.

The whole month of November was pretty much a blank for me as far as fiction. Truth to tell, it was a month of identity crises and poetic self-pity parties. It finally took the ticking clock to put a gun to my head - that and shooting off my mouth - to light fire enough under me to get this thing written.
Check out these stats, though:
up to 11/27: 11,000 words
11/28: 16,605 total cumulative
11/29: 33,584 ttl cumulative
finish: 51,306
Which means I wrote
16,979 words of narrative fiction on 29 November 2008 (mostly undisturbed except for an hour spent cleaning the kitchen)

17,722 words of narrative fiction on 30 November 2008 (watching football on TV and watching the scores on nfl.com intermittently over the 13-hour sprint to finish the marathon). To the best of my knowledge, the best day previously was between 11 and 13 thousand words last October to finish O Southern Queen on my way to writing my nano last year . . .

Not that I’m bragging. I really just wanted to let folks know what a schmuck hermit like me can do. And if a schmuck hermit like David M Pitchford can do it . . . anyone who wants to and applies the effort can do it (well, and a working vocabulary in a language in which they are literate).

As I take some of the color out and try to bring it down to a PG13 rating, I’ll post the novel in bits on my new blog http://out4cigarettes.wordpress.com