NaNo 2011 - Day 6

Whoops. Usually i'm a bit better about keeping up with my thoughts and feelings over the course of a November. The truth is, this year, i'm (was) neck and neck with one of my friends so just about ever spare second was spent writing on my story.

Today being the sixth, i should be at about 10,000 words. Due to the fact that the friend I've been neck and neck with is going for one hundred thousand words as opposed the regular fifty thousand, she's helped push me to push out over 16 thousand words.

The official count right now is 16,425 while i take a break and get some work done in completing the company calendar.

14k of that was completed by Friday. After that, a small conversation with Boyfriend Jon led me to question my entire timeline of my story. Turns out, not paying attention in pretty much any of my history classes was a problem after all. My memory of events and corresponding years was faulty and caused an enormous hole in my story that could not logically be breached in any way that still made sense.

It had a huge effect on me. I was instantly frustrated and i frantically searched about online for some other way of fixing this huge hole. I snapped at poor Boyfriend Jon, and a headache took a strong hold at the base of my neck. There was no logical way i could get two young men into Europe, but not to join the war, without completely deviating from history. Finally I got an idea.

I have an Uncle, who is renowned in our family for talking about WW2 at great length and even occasionally exhaustion. Now normally, when he goes off on his rants, i leave the room or stare at him until i start to nod off. WW2 history doesn't interest me in the least. The only reason i'm writing about it is to give the story an urgency and an easy bad guy. Not to mention Indiana Jones is one of the inspiration and who is Indiana Jones always's fighting? oh yeah. The Nazis.

But now, at day 6 i was being forced to consider the possibility that i would need to completely alter the timeline, perhaps even choosing a completely different era. That might have been less daunting at day 6 if i was actually following the 1667 words a day. But 14,000 words is a LOT to have to compeltely re-write.

So, back to my Uncle. When i called he wasn't home so i enlisted my cousin to do what the women in our family refer to as the sweet insistence. Which in this case involved her standing over him with the phone in her hand telling him how much his niece (me) needed his help and without him my entire project might fail. Of which i said no such thing, but i got a phone call back from him in a surprisingly short amount of time.

As i laid out my problem for him, he kept interrupting me telling me about where else in Europe the Germans were fighting during 1939. Border disputes with the French were the least of the battles as the Germans moved over eastern europe. Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Russia taking advantage to try and get their share of the land. May i just say...power hungry idiots!?

But when i explained the path that i needed my characters to follow, he gave me two lumps of SOLID GOLD. One being that i could land my characters in Spain which was a neutral port. Neutral port to neutral port meant that they were less likely ("accidents" happened all the time) to be sunk by U-boats.

And if i made my characters arrive in France before June 3rd and if they left to go into Italy before June 10th (when Italy declared war on France), they would be able to go straight through  without too much of a problem. It would be even better if i gave them some way of diplomatic immunity.

So there you go. You've now been caught up with my frenzied recalculation that has taken up most of my weekend. As a matter of fact, i don't think I've written 2 thousand words all weekend. I just was so not feeling it. Which is why i said that i WAS neck and neck with my friend. I think the last i hear she was coming up on 22k. Which i'm so excited for her but my competitive nature is like OMFG! STOP TYPING SO I CAN CATCH UP.

Boyfriend Jon is also eliciting a similar response as he's approaching 20k right now, or so he tells me.