Day five came and went and I finally cashed in my extra words.
A number of practical issues came up today, and in the end I started writing at 8 pm and finished at 2 am, including a number of pauses.

Then the story got lost.
It was not supposed to happen, as I had my set pieces in order in my mind and only to put on the page, but it did not work out.
I stumbled into a single glaring logical hole at the core of my structure, and as a result, I had to backtrack and try to set things straight.

Now backtracking is never a good idea – the standard practice should be to go on writing, and just make a note, directly in the text, about the changes that will be needed in the previous chapters, to be made during revision.
That’s what I should have done, but I was foolish and I backtracked. A character shifted from thirty years of age to fifty, and more infodumps were sneaked into the structure.
End result: 6300 words written in almost six hours, and then I really could not take it anymore, and I cashed in my 700 words bonus,
The total word count now is 25.004. No more bonuses, no more extras.
Tomorrow I will need to write 8000 words, and 9000 on Sunday.
And then it will be done.
Wish me luck.

Today was the first really hard day of this challenge.
I was expecting a heavy day, and it was just so. I started writing late, wasted some time due to an unexpected disaster (a small flooding of my kitchen due to a broken bucket) and other engagements (including cooking my killer *penne all’arrabbiata+ for dinner), and basically I started at eight and finished at 2 am, in four sessions of writing.
But it’s all right – I wrote 6100 words, further increasing my extra fund of words.
Today’s part might be deemed somewhat “infodump-y” by some, but after all there is a point in which I must give you a bit of background.
The story currently clocks at 18.700 words, and is going in the right direction.
I have the next plot points laid out clearly in my mind, and tomorrow we’ll go for the 7000 words mark.
It occurred to me that by doing this incremental thing, I’ll be writing more in the next three days than I wrote in the first four so far.
The balance, so to speak, of the story, is about to shift. Tomorrow we pass the halfway-point, and the novel begins finishing.
Or something.

The soundtrack for today’s writing was provided by Renaissance, with their album Scheherazade and other Stories, which is quite good, and it suited the – limited – action of today’s chapters.

Now a cup of tea, and then I’ll try and write a post for tomorrow.
No, better – a mug of chamomile infusion, and  I’ll write a post tomorrow morning, so I won’t risk it disappearing again.

Third day, and five thousand words done, and it was harder than I expected.
In part because all of a sudden I found myself lost, with the classic “where do we go from here?” moment of panic, and in part because my friend Marina (that will be a beta reader when this adventure is over) found a way to distract me at about 500 words from the finish line.
But I made it.

Now Rose, the main character, is fully rounded, and motivated.
We know her background, and know she won’t give in when faced with darkness.
The seeds of future discoveries have been planted, and evil has made its first incursion in the ordered and quiet life of Rose.
Now the dread “first third” of the novel lurks – and tomorrow I’ll have to write 6000 words, and that’s gonna be a true challenge – the first glimpse of the hardships to come.

But I’ll make it.
If I’m not too distracted – because Marina pointed out to me the new Humble Bundle, that for fifteen bucks drops in your hard disk every strip ever published (and a lot never published before from Berkley Breathed’s Bloom County.
And you also help a charity. Isn’t the internet beautiful?
That’s why I wasted half an hour tonight: to get me my share of Bloom County, one of my all-time favorite series. I’ll be downloading digital comics for weeks, but it will be worth the wait.

As a side note, I wrote today’s 5000 words without a musical background.

Now a short break, and then I’ll prepare a post for tomorrow.

Day two is gone, I did my 4000 words, and I also met a little problem.
Nothing technical, really.

Just like on day one, I started at 6 pm, and in half an hour I hammered out a nice 500-words scene. Then I stopped, I took a walk – I had been working at a translation all day long – and then prepared dinner.
I was back at the keyboard at 7.40, with Imelda May’s latest album, Life, Love, Flesh, Blood, going as background.
And I got a call from a friend. I set up her blog about eight months ago, but sometimes in these months she decided she did not like the way it looked anymore, so she tried to change it herself, and basically made a mess.
As a result, I spent until 9 pm doing virtual help desk duty.
For free.

So, rule for survival: when you are writing a novel in seven days, tell your friends and family what you are doing.
They will not care anyway, of course – after all, you are just sitting there and making stuff up, it’s not like a phone call, a chat session, a quick drive to the 7-11 or practicing the Heimlich maneuver to their pet goat is gonna cause you any distraction or waste any of your time.
No, they won’t care, but if you tell them, at least you won’t blame yourself for not telling then.

Anyway, at 9 pm I cracked up Imelda May and got rolling, doing two sessions with an half an hour break, ending at 11.40 with 4200 words in the bag. This brings the total word count of the first two days at 7450, giving me a bonus of 450 words – about half an hour of leisurely writing.

Tomorrow I must hit 5000, and things will start getting serious.
But the morale is good, the story seems to be going in the right direction, and tomorrow I’ll unplug my phone and my web connection, to be on the safe side.