I don’t think I’m going to come even close to making a decent headway on the novel today. I just can’t write.

I’ve tried and tried. I’ve been sitting and staring at this screen, trying to squeeze out something, anything, for the past three and a half hours. Yesterday, three hours saw me churning out 2,386 words in this one sitting; today, I have written a grand total of 132. This is not going well.

I don’t get it. Yesterday when I faltered a little on the story, I just listened to the song that the chapter was losely based on and the problem was immediately solved. Today, I have listened to chapter four’s song, “Professional Widow,” many more times than I care to count. I even have multiple versions — the trunkin remix, the merry widow live version, the eight minute who-knows-what remix, and a regular live version, all in addition to the original, of course. I’m guessing that it’s not really helping this time.

I only have a few disjointed ideas of where I want to go with this chapter. I know it’s going to involve vampires in some form or another. I’m trying to foreshadow and I suck at foreshadowing. Maybe I should just give my bitchy “I must be in the spotlight” character full reign and let her do all the work. But she’s oddly quiet today. That’s when you know something’s wrong, that even Heather shut up.

Ugh. I just want to get this done with so I can go do something else. I could be done by now if I could just get myself to write! But no, I’ll be stuck here till bedtime and probably won’t even have a thousand words to show for it.

(Later.) It was four hours total that I was frustrated earlier. By the end of it, I was devastated at the idea of only having managed that much for the whole day, but what could I do? That was a very low point.

So after dinner and a half hour of Gilmore Girls, I sat down at the computer and in just ninety minutes produced the nineteen hundred words I need to to just pass my daily goal for a total of 2,039 words. DAMN.

I probably wrote really awful stuff for nineteen hundred words that will make me cringe tomorrow, that will require massive editing come December (rule is no editing till finals are over – 12/20), but I wrote them. I can actually force the creative juices to flow and keep going.

This is powerful knowledge. It’s one thing to be able to churn out 2400 on a good day when everything’s going swell, and a completely different one to make yourself do 1900 when everything’s screaming “No!” I can see that this is really getting out all my procrastinating habits and former status as “writer when she’s in the mood.” I feel proud of those horrible 1900 words! I relish them! I will stick them proudly on the Internet and, though this may be the worst chapter in the novel yet, I will proclaim to the world “Look what I did!”

I continue to amaze myself every day with this attempt to write a 50,000 word novel in thirty days. But then, this is not the first time I’ve suspected that I work best under pressure.

Hey, Heather just came back! First time I’ve heard a voice all day. Didn’t think I’d be happy to see her, and she is being evil again now, but I was getting a little lonely. She brought a friend, too. Isn’t it precious.