20,049 words. I fear that I've hit the 2/5 mark for complete crap speculative fiction.
The parts I like best are the minor story lines and, as a result, I think my book may be pointed at the wrong main characters.
Of course, the self-doubt ninjas continue to pelt me with the razor-sharp throwing stars of second thought, so I have no idea whether I should shift gears and change the focus or continue plugging away in the direction I've been traveling for 20,000+ words.
In short, OMG.
I think I need to see it printed out, but in its rough state the guilt over dead trees would further disable my ability to press on through the end of the book.
To top it off, one of my favorite authors released a book last week, as he does at the end of every October. It is the end of a trilogy, with the previous book having ended in a cliffhanger. I don't have time for that! I've got another 30,000 words to write!

Yesterday I was in a meeting about Disaster Recovery. The meeting ended with a short film about the subject.
The narrator, cast to look the middle manager, said, "This is our crisis response team. Every week we get together to discuss what might happen and how we might address the issue."
Good, right? Makes sense, and his voice over the scene of five or six people sitting around a box of doughnuts was not distracting. However, when he stopped talking the people around the doughnuts started. They took turns like this:
"What happens if our data storage closet is flooded? Do we have back ups stored off-site?"
"What if a fire destroys corporate headquarters? How do we get our people to work?"
"What if an armed band of multinational terrorists compromises one of our manufacturing facilities and the stand off lasts for weeks? How do we get office supplies to our people on the inside?"
I know, that last one sounds like a joke. It is funny enough that if it were a joke I'd claim it. Unfortunately, they really said that.
After swallowing the blood pooling in my mouth from clamping my teeth down on my tongue, I started spewing my own list of calamities:
"What happens if a swarm of rabid bats infests the server room? And the only admins available to do reboots have long hair, which tangles the biting, flapping beasts?"
"Let's say another naked homeless guy runs through the lobby, but this time the sight causes the accounting group to take a sick day en masse? Who cuts our checks?"
"Ok. A herd of angry, sleep-deprived weasels dashes through the cube farm, biting and scratching our employees. Does a standard fire extinguisher deter them? How about if you use it as a primitive weasel-smashing device? Does whacking them with a USB keyboard kill them or just stun them?"
In other news, yesterday I got "promoted" to Disaster Recovery Lead.

Yesterday featured the titanic struggle between me and the tag team of writer's block and self-doubt. My mental image features me in a Godzilla suit getting knocked around by writer's block and self-doubt dressed as Rodan and Mothra. Or maybe Mecha-Godzilla.
Either way, as we smashed through the Tokyo of my novel, frantic, screaming adjectives ran all over everywhere in a blind panic.
I don't blame them. There was much carnage.
I'm starting to fear I've wasted this whole time on a subject that is more short story than novel, but last night I managed to squeeze some more information into the early chapters. It may stretch without breaking, but time and carpal tunnel will tell.
I've been compensating by writing especially terse emails at work. Leaving out the proper names of servers may be a bit confusing for the recipients until December, but we all have to make sacrifices, right?
I'm the only person I know whose book qualifies as "Speculative Fiction", but I'll hit the NaNoWriMo message boards later to see if I can find anyone else who is having some of the same issues I'm feeling related to time lines and technologies.
If not, I'll just talk smack about those losers in Maryland and return to churning prose, seemingly at random.

16,844 words.

Ouch. My typing hurts.

15,135 words.

8,917 words down, 41,0832 to go before December 1st.

Holy crap.

I've noticed that the faster I type and the more often I glance down at the clock in the bottom right corner of my screen the more odd things happen in the story.
I don't know if the plot is poorly thought out and malleable or if the novel is just becoming this weird organic thing.
Either way, my 8,917 words followed me around through sleep and a shower, tugging at my subconscious and self-editing like little demons. The friendly adjectives from yesterday have become mocking, bitter little words -- and there is no good among them.
Whoever finds this journal, please tell my family I love them.
The pains of clunky dialog sap my strength, leech my will to press on and create no small amount of abdominal cramping.

Actually, I strayed from my outline early on, changed some planned character names and altered the mythology to make it easier to describe.
This is what I love about "speculative fiction":

Cyborg pirates with laser swords

Since those aren't in my book, I'll dwell on the other thing I love about "speculative fiction":

In mythology, there are basic ground rules established which communicate how the world works. Magic always has a price, they say. The hero always denies the call to action at first. Every terrible monster has a weakness.
With speculative fiction (arguably the modern mythology) no matter how fantastic the setting, there still have to be rules.
In Star Wars, hyperdrive technology enables the characters to travel to fantastic locations.
Star Trek uses warp drives and transporters to accomplish the same thing.
The failure of either of these established conventions becomes a plot point that ends up with Han and Leia flying crazy through an asteroid belt and Kirk trapped on a planet with a lizardlike Gorn intent on killing him.
If Luke Skywalker could be beamed out of his fight with Darth Vader, Star Wars would lose something and the audience would notice.
Were Kirk to switch on a lightsaber and hack the Gorn to pieces it would break Star Trek. Arguably the last example could also reform Star Trek into something better and more awesome, but this is just more proof that adding a laser sword to anything makes it at least 40% more awesome.
Holy crap! Adding laser swords is totally Airwolf!
I tried to figure out a way to communicate these rules for my own setting without falling into a canned-sounding sidebar or pulling too long away from the action.
Whether or not I am successful all depends on the behaviour of these awful and numerous little words.

4,832 words for Day One of NaNoWriMo, people. 4,832 words.
I started the day using a cut-and-paste word counter , but then I discovered that a word count function is built into the Google Online Word Processor.
I also learned early on that descriptive passages are to be embraced and that adjectives are my little friends. Oh, how I love those adjectives.
Look! 50 tools to increase your writing skill!
Yesterday morning a fiber card failed, instantly plunging our corporate office into a connectivity-free zone.
There was no internet, no email, no network shares and no IP phone.
Since I have nothing to do with the communications equipment, I reveled in the freedom.
A weird thing happened as a side-effect of the outage. People talked.
Seriously. They wandered to the other side of the cube wall and just talked.
I spoke with the guy that sits on the back corner of my cube block about digital photography. We discussed brands and models of cameras, memory formats and WiFi cards that drop recently taken photos directly to a network share.
Neither of us uses a digital camera for work at all.
After the part was replaced, everyone shuffled back to their cubicle and silence took over the office again.
Plans for today include refining our monitoring solution and slogging through an application with no support or documentation to make it do something it was never designed to do.
I may also wander over to another cubicle to chat at some point.

Convenience

I'm a creature of habit (and compulsion and addiction). Since I started work, I've made a tradition of wandering over to the drug store in the underground mall a couple of times a week to load up on a few bottles of Coke Zero (300+ Coke Reward Points and nothing to spend them on) for the constant and static check-out price of $6.69.
Monday I wandered over, grabbed my bottles and lugged them to the counter. After I signed the receipt, the clerk told me I'd need to stock up -- Friday would be their last day in business.
I was visibly shaken by this announcement.
The clerk told me the mall was raising his rent and that he couldn't afford it.
They had offered him a smaller space, but he has no way to cram all the convenience into a smaller store.
As a result, this dedicated small business owner is out on the street, and I'm out of a place to buy bottles of Coke Zero for less than $1.50 each. I would hate to have to decide which of us is the most crushed by this.
I thought about the business climate in this tiny mall. There are several fast food places, an independent theatre and an off-branded Starbucks (owned by the hotel, unable to accept the Starbucks card) and people wander in during lunch mostly.
They get no traffic from people who don't work directly above the mall, since it costs to park and there are other, better places to go.
The mall has to make money, but forcing this guy out of business just feels wrong.
Is it his fault mall revenue is down and property taxes are up?
Is he to blame for providing 90% of the non-fast food items office people need from time-to-time which causes him to fill such a large store with goods?
Should the convenience provided by this gentleman and (I assume) his family be sacrificed on the altar of corporate greed?

Meh.

How do I know?

I just know that he'd move more product if he wasn't asking $7.99 for a dusty bottle of Arrid X-tra Dry that expired in 2002.

Last night I manned the fort while my family went out and gathered candy from the neighbors. We feel it is important to have someone home to hand out l3w+ given the large numbers of teenaged trick-or-treaters who stop by -- probably armed with toilet paper and eggs.
I sat by the door, dropping grim reaper bubbles and rubber ducks in the treat bags of costumed visitors and reading comics on the laptop.
I read Batman and Dracula and the Vampirella Halloween Special. It seemed appropriate.
Today NaNoWriMo officially begins. Goodbye, free time. I knew you when.