Yipee Ki Yi Yay

I made the NaNo 50,000 before noon today but I'm waiting until tomorrow to upload to the verifier as I've still got to transfer it into a text file and then scramble it. I wasn't in a hurry to get that done today because when I input my word count for yesterday at just after 11PM my time, the scripts at NaNo credited it to today which left me with another zero showing for yesterday. The same thing had happened to me the first week when I input my word count just after 9PM my time and that quite frustrated me since I was scrupulous to not start writing until after midnight on the first day and was assured that I had until midnight on the 30th to verify. A couple of weeks later though I input after ten and got credit for the still current day. So I relaxed. Then this happened last night.

I decided early today that I wouldn't worry about updating my word count today at all because, for one thing, whose gonna believe that total of near 7K for a single day? And for another I hoped to get one scene polished enough to input into the excerpt form at NaNo finally and then use it for my Friday Snippet this evening also. That project was going quite well all afternoon and evening but its still not quite ready to post.

I'm not getting nearly enough return on investment of minutes to warrant continuing to force it. This is due in part to having had only three hours of sleep this morning because I could not go back to sleep after Ed woke me up to tell me to relax about going after our glasses today because his Dad was going to drive him over to pick up both pair and then drive him to work before returning here with mine. I was just too excited to go back to sleep. I had them before eight-thirty. For the first several hours I was silently singing 'I can see! I can see! I can see!' I was able to change the font I was working with for my NaNo story from 20pt down to 12pt. I discovered I could read some of my most important reference materials without a magnifying glass again. I tested a page in The Historian, the novel I was reading for the Read-a-Thon in October and so demoralized me then when I found my reading speed had slipped below 20 pages per hour from the better than 50 of six years ago.

But by mid afternoon things were not so thrilling. I was suffering what amounted to motion sickness brought on by my efforts to focus and refocus between screen, keyboard and reference material through the unfamiliar bifocals. I also lost a lot of time to attempts to reorganize my workspace to find a better level for the screen so that I wouldn't have to point my nose at the ceiling in order to focus through the lower part of the lenses.

I lost even more time to an exploration of a baby name site to look for a new last name for my male POV. I've been unhappy with it almost from the get go but hadn't wanted to take the time to look for another one. It is one of those things I can easily spend all day contemplating and researching and I was deliberately denying myself the right to indulge that little fetish. But when I chose one of his POV scenes to showcase and began working on it this morning, I just couldn't keep typing 'Professor Simons' it wasn't clicking for me. I couldn't bond with him. I considered going with his middle name, Palmer, as his last. That almost worked but I had reasons for wanting his last name to reflect either his Italian or Jewish heritage. After more than an hour I found this: Carmelo is pronounced kar-MAY-loh. It is of Italian and Hebrew origin, and its meaning is "fruitful orchard; garden". Biblical place name: refers to Mount Carmel in Israel, which is referred to in ancient writings as a kind of paradise. What better name for a man who has made Dante's Divine Comedy the focus of his life? There are actually several reasons this name and it's meanings mesh right in with the fabric of this story, thematically and otherwise.

Since settling on that around two this afternoon, I was able to make quite good progress on a rewrite of one of Professor Graham Palmer Carmelo's scenes. I thoroughly enjoyed the time I spent in his company too. This is the way I keep anticipating the whole month of NaNo will be like and then get horribly dispirited when there are only there or four days like this out of the entire thirty.

There is a very good chance I can have this scene ready to post by early afternoon tomorrow. That is if I can get some solid rejuvenating sleep first.