Up to 35,405 words in the wee hours of Friday. Two or three more chapters should be up here on the site later today.

EIGHT MORE CHAPTERS from my NaNoWriMo novel-writing project The Myrtle of Venus are now up at this link. (I’m now up to 32,250 words, including chapters not yet posted to the site.)

When I crashed last night, I’d gotten to 31036 words. That’s a little ahead of the pace needed to complete 50,000 in 30 days; yet the story looks like it’ll take more than that to be fully fleshed out. Some more excerpts should be up on this site later today.

Spent the entire day writing and got all the way up to a whoppin’ 28,022 words. Will try to sprint toward the full 50,000-word quota over the upcoming week or so.

You may now see the first half-dozen mini-chapters of my National Novel Writing Month project, The Myrtle of Venus, at this link.

Ta da! Halfway through the month, I’m halfway through the goal of 50,000 words in 30 days. I typed in word 25,002 at 11:36 Saturday night. A very short excerpt from my story, The Myrtle of Venus, is at this link.

I should add that the 25,002 words I’ve written are not consecutive. I’ve got an outline and a series of scenes, and I’ve been “fleshing out” the prose in these scenes as I come up with ideas on how to do such. This often means I’ll write a passage for a certain character, then hop to another scene that same character’s in and either “plant” a new plot point I’ll refer to later in the story or flash forward to a subsequent bit of that character’s action.

I’m now up to 23,159 words, with one day left ’til the halfway point in my 50,000-words-in-30-days exercise. I like what I’m doing enough to post excerpts on this site, and will when I get the time and/or inclination to polish up the prose enough to make it presentable.

Boeing’s steady decline as a world-class manufacturing enterprise (let alone as a Wash. state employer) continues with the announcement that the new 7E7 jet’s wing assemblies will be subcontracted to Japanese companies.

Michael Chrichton’s otherwise pathetic mid-’90s thriller novel Airframe, set at a fictionalized Lockheed, has a big subplot predicting this, and denouncing the export of the US aerospace biz’s most important proprietary technology.

I’d denounce it too, if I thought denouncing it’d accomplish anything. Today’s Boeing, though, seems to care about nothing but its own short-term stock price.

My novel’s up to 19,515 words. I’m now only one day behind the pace I need to finish 50,000 in 30 days.

Made significant progress today, getting up to 15,460 words. By tomorrow, I’d need a total of 20,000 to meet the average pace required to get to 50,000 by the 30th. Hey, I might make the short-term goal, and I stand an excellent chance of making the final goal. As of this posting I’m #34 among 134 Seattle National Novel Writing Month participants in to-date verbiage production.

Some people are apparently irate about a Pioneer Square restaurant offering something called “Naked Sushi,” an evening in which little sushi tidbits are served from the Saran-wrapped torso of a reposing woman (wearing just enough, besides the Saran, to appease the Liquor Board).

This is essentially a commercialization of an old Yoko Ono performance-art piece; or, if you will, a fusion-cuisine adaptation of an old entertainment shtick done in Hellfire Club-era London drinking parlors (as fantasized about in Geoff Nicholson’s novel The Food Chain.)

It’s not a statement of hatred against women or against sushi. If the restaurant in question presents it in the proper way, it could be a statement of sensuality, of adoration, and of honor for the circle of life.

Or, if the restaurant in quesiton presents it in the improper way, it could just be a silly little lark.

…the sold-out Rendezvous Reading Series last night, at which I showed off my travelogue pix from my August jury-duty assignment in Kent. One reading-goer even suggested it should become a book. I’ll consider it.

Now, I’m back to my National Novel Writing Month self-imposed chores. It’s going slower, at 13,117 words. But I did go back to the outlining of scenes, which is much further along. So the prose-ification of these scenes should go much more smoothly from here on.

Have written 8850 words. (I don’t warranty them to be good words.) About 80 percent of my projected remaining scenes are now in breakdown/outline form.

The self-imposed deadline exercise has shown me just how much unproductive routine has accumulated in my current life of long-term underemployment. To make more writing time, I’ve cut my TV viewing to three shows (Black and White Overnight, Coronation Street, and Zed). I’ve cut my news reading to one paper a day. I’ve cut my email reading down to messages real individuals have written specifically to me. Next to be cut: The fourteen web sites I try to look at at least every other day.

My novel writing is almost up to the speed required to finish 50,000 words in 30 days. Ten percent of the alloted time into the task, I’m at 4,500 words (90 percent of the pace I need).

Will I post it here? Yeah, but not just yet.

…is off to a slow start. As of now (7:12 p.m. Sunday), I’ve completed exactly half of the word quota I need in order to make 50,000 words in 30 days.

I’m trying to write my novel the way they write soap operas: Start with a broad overview of the storyline, then elaborate that into a scene-by-scene breakdown, then fill in the actual dialogue and descriptions. I roughly have breakdowns for the first week’s worth of chapters, and am trudging through turning the second chapter into pristine prose.

If I’d been truly on the proverbial bean, I’d have had all the chapter breakdowns, and a couple thousand words o’ text, done by now. With luck and gumption, I may be able to catch up.