Writing is going well.  I’m at around 18500 words in NaNoWriMo (the write a 50K novel in a month deal), which has me a little ahead.  I am trying to write a day or two ahead of where I “need” to be on average (about 1667 words a day) so that when the hard parenting days come, I can leave it and not stress about getting behind.

Doing this sort of writing sprint for a “book 2″ (I think it’s droll to work on book 2 considering that book 1 hasn’t had its first major rewrite yet) has been very helpful for character development – for example, a bad guy character from book 1 is now semi-heroic (flawed).  It’s fun to explore without the pressure and to see the long arc of the series.  There is so much that I’m not writing – the big overarching political thriller part.  I want to add it in, but 50K words isn’t enough room, so I don’t.

Two migraines in two days. That sucks.  Today’s was intractable – nothing helped – and went on for hours and hours.  If I had lots of money and someone to watch my kid, I would do what doctors think people with intractable migraines do every time it’s overwhelming: I’d go to the ER.  However, I’m a parent and have to live in the real world, so I just sucked it up: I parented, I baked pumpkin bread, I cooked dinner, and I wrote.  In a lot of pain.  (Doctors: WTF?  Who has time/money for the ER?)   I was able to get an appointment with the neurologist next week (as opposed to my December 29 standing appointment) so hopefully something can be addressed then.  Maybe they’ll say (again), “Well, you don’t seem to go to the ER very much.”

Themes: I keep messing with WordPress themes.  I really loved my old “Elegant Grunge” theme, except that WP made it a featured theme and it’s popping up everywhere.  I hate that.  I’m OK with what I’m using now, but I just don’t love-love-love it.  On the plus side, all this messing with HTML and CSS is reminding me of my old skills.  Since there aren’t any legal jobs, I might as well brush up on the older parts of my resume…