What moves you?

OK, now I'm just plain gloating. I owe it all to Duffy and the brilliance that is the Typewriter Brigade. I've hit a couple of rough patches here at the end of the first third of the story, but that's mostly due to under-planning on my part. As a whole, I'm excited about my NaNovel, and think it's coming together well for the hasty, poorly typed draft that it is. And I'm especially digging how the lack of a mass-select-and-delete feature has forced me to redo a page or two here and there when I just couldn't let it lie (and needed a hook for later.)

Using Rollabind to keep the manuscript together has been a good thing, too. I've filled the first set of discs, and need to move into a new notebook with today's writing. I like being able to go back and drop in pages that need to be inserted, like this morning's work of fleshing out past scenes or doing some rewrites of exceptionally strange pages. I'm looking forward to revising this around mid-December, and running it past "the critics" in our house, namely my wife, my English prof. mom, and my son, who this whole thing is really for.

Somewhere in the past year, we stopped the habit of the nightly bedtime story: he outgrew it, or his younger sister grew into it, or something, but pretty much gone are the days when he'd fall asleep listening to me read Dr. Seuss or Tolkien or fables or whatever. Now he skulks out of his room just before bedtime, his radio blaring the local all-rock-goofy-DJ station-with-the-awesome-name, gives us a good-night kiss, and that's it until he's hunched over cereal and comics at dawn. He's still reading on the sly, and we keep his room well-stocked with books, but I'm looking forward to sharing this one with him. And that's really the motivation for NaNo for me this year. He's the reason I'm busting out the word count this time around, the reason I'm not anguishing over the really awful clunky dialog I've laid down, and the reason why I'm going to go over every single page with a pen in hand and edit, edit, edit this bastard until I'm not ashamed to read it aloud.

Come December 1 I'll hang up my "novelist" hat for a year -- note to self: buy a noveling hat -- but this year, I'm doing it with a little more pride.