WOOOOOOOO! I just hit 50,000 words in my novel! I know it’s late and all, but I had a lot of coffee–some of it with marshmallows which wasn’t very good though I like Sarah’s idea of whipped cream in coffee–so I’m not tired and I’m just having to go to the bathroom all the time anyway ’cause I drink a ton of water and I have a bladder the size of a walnut or something else that’s really little so it’s not like I would stay asleep for very long even if I did try to sleep right now anyway. Besides, Ian’s in bed probably taking up the whole thing and he’s snoring like usual and I have the cat out here on the couch and it’s pretty comfy out here so I don’t mind not going to bed for a while yet ’cause I don’t work again until Saturday so I can just sleep as much as I want tomorrow which is actually today though that’ll mess up my sleep schedule as if it isn’t already messed up all the time anyway. What was I talking about? Oh yeah, I broke 50k words! Wooohooo! How exciting!

The novel has taken some interesting turns so far. I’ve been mentally breaking the book up into three distinct parts. The first part is where Sol and her friend Erra go traveling together to get materials to make wands when Erra gets petrified by a basilisk and then Sol decides she’s got to figure out some way to bring Erra back and determines her best way is to sign up for a tournament where the grand prize is a magic wish granted. (I really need to work on breaking up my sentences more but the caffeine is taking over more than I care to admit or correct.) Sol gets together a few people who’ll help her train, and that’s the end of part one. Part two is actually in two parts itself: every other chapter is a flashback to when Sol and Erra were traveling together (even chapters) and the odd chapters are actually following Sol and her friends as they train for the tournament. Part three is then the actual tournament itself and conclusion of the book. I finished part one earlier this morning (actually yesterday morning; hooray for bending space and time in my head!) and then took a break in order to collect my thoughts, update my notes, and do some editing. Part two is where things started getting messy.

See, the thing with part two is that because it itself is in two parts, it’s written in two different ways. One is in the form of flashbacks as if those chapters were simply removed from their time and shifted back toward the end in the book. They aren’t told from a point of view looking backward but as though it’s what Sol is actually doing at that time. The flashbacks themselves start with the last days of the journey with Erra and move backward to the first days. It’s really confusing. There are only four such chapters as it is planned out so far, and I thought I had their order figured out only to have my characters run away from me and do something completely unexpected so I had to reverse the order! They were originally going to be from oldest to latest, but that went out the window as soon as Sol and Erra got drunk in a bar. Crazy girls. It seemed that the more they drank, the more bellicose they became. Pugnacious, even. (Can you tell I’m feeling silly? Hooray for cafffeine overdose! Ha cha cha cha.) At any rate, because of their actions, I had to remove what I had written for chapter eight and move it to chapter fourteen and then come up with something to replace it in chapter eight. I decided that I would simply continue working on the even chapters of part two and therefore skipped to chapter ten as soon as chapter eight was more or less finalized. I’m still only about halfway finished with chapter ten, but I realized that I broke 50,000 words (I was checking just about every other paragraph because I knew I was close) so I decided to pause to post.

And post I have! Indeed and ye verily and such, I’ve posted and it was mighty. I should go to bed, oughtn’t I? Neh. I had something else to say, but seeing as how it like my mind has chosen to leave me, I may as well make an attempt at sleep. Everyone else in the house is sleeping, after all. Time to join the majority! Yeehaw! 50,000 words! The month isn’t even half over. I wonder where I’ll be by the thirtieth.

Happy birthday, Kelly! 😀