The word count at the end of today on Dead of Winter was 12,323 words.  Not too bad.  I am beating the per-day average of 1,667 words by about a 2-1 margin, and the fair Bebe has served as an excellent nemesis to compete against.  I feel good about the way the plot is unfolding, and I am enjoying the banter between my characters.  So far, it's been a major change of pace from last year.  In 2008, I was writing a doctoral thesis.  This year, it's an actual novel.

My Steve McNair jersey should be here in a few days, since it shipped today via priority USPS and is only coming from Los Angeles.  I may have to make a photo post where I lay out all my jerseys; the collection is pretty extensive.  Another item I am waiting for is my upgrade copy to Windows 7 (provided free via Dell for those ordering within a certain time frame), so I can dump Vista and its annoying constant stream of pop-ups asking me if I am sure I really want to run a program, upgrade a driver or in general do anything at all.  Vista is all right, I suppose, but I am definitely looking forward to increased stability and wringing some more drops of horsepower out of Nemesis.

Oh, and I had a BSOD with the Alienware after installing a new set of display drivers, so thank God for Windows Restore Point software.  Whew.

Got a few more days left on vacation, and it's been rather restful this week.

Night, all.

I watched for a week and it all came crashing down tonight.  I bought another sports jersey.  Steve McNair Tenneessee Titans #9.  Price in store:  $220.00.  My price:  $39.95.

Thank you, Ebay.  And thank you to my wife for putting up with my addiction.

Word count right now on Dead of Winter is 7,784.  I'm having a glass of $60 per bottle wine to help my wife celebrate that one of her crappy co-workers got the axe today; my nickname for her was "The Emperess."  I am enjoying The Proposal with my man Ryan Reynolds, and the reboot of V comes on tonight.

Wow, occasional tooth pain aside, this vacation is going well.  How's your end of the 'verse today?

So today I finished the prologue chapter of Dead of Winter and also started the first chapter as well.  I finished pretty close to 5,000 words, and I got a lot of football watching done, plus I showed up for a taping of Good Morning Sacramento at 8:30 or so this morning.  You can see the story they ran on our group at this link, and I am the one in the red and white flannel shirt and the ponytail.  Plus, they used Nemesis for the starting point of the video, so I had a good hitch of pride there.  All in all, today was a good day.

Going to a write-in tomorrow and I'll play some Dan Patrick while chewing into the book.  All in all, a good start.

I've been asked by some people what the plot is for this year's edition of National Novel Writing Month.  Here's the sales pitch:

A grisly murder in Lake Tahoe draws the attention of a fledgling paranormal investigation team working on behalf of private interests and the United States government.  The previous incarnation of the group met an unearthly fate at the hands of unknown gathering dark forces, and now it appears the team is in over their heads as the mystery darkens and the body count rises.  Will the team even be able to save their own souls, much less those of the people they have sworn to defend?

That's the cover letter response.  The pat answer I give people is that Dead of Winter is "part The X-Files, part Ghostbusters and part CSI... and deadly business."  It's got ghosts, demons, serial killers, ritual torture, police procedure, skulduggery, smokescreens and general hellraising.

So yeah, that's my newest project.

Oh, and the laptop?  It's apparently going to arrive on Friday.  This Friday.

Life's good, my devoted peeps.  Life's good.

Here in Sacramento it's currently 103 degrees at 6:55 PM, but I don't care.  See, I'm plotting,

When asked where he got his ideas for writing, Stephen King had a stock answer:  "Utica.  There's a nice little shop there where I go in and browse around until I see something I really like, and then I buy it and go."  It's a great answer because the honest to God truth is that there is no one place where ideas come from.  They can be as fantastic, ordinary or strange as can be, and you'll never know where inspiration will come from.  All you can count on is that when the iron strikes hot, the ideas will flow like water.

I'm a huge fan of CSI, the J.D. Robb/Nora Roberts In Death series, urban fantasy fiction and a classic good versus evil struggle.  Dead of Winter will provide the opportunity to indulge all those joneses, so maybe that's why I'm already outlining the third chapter on yWriter and having a blast doing so.

And really, in the end, it's just good to have the passion bucket overflowing again.

So in my last post I was wondering what to do for NaNoWriMo 2009.  I am pleased--bouncing off the walls, actually--to report that problem is solved.

Back in 1993, I started a novel titled Dead of Winter, where a very determined young woman (who may or may not be psychic) is matched up against a serial killer.  She tries to track him through dreams and nightmares, glomming onto the case as her father is one of the detectives assigned to the case, and in the end has a bloody-as-hell showdown with the wicked entity... and discovers she is truly not the equal of the task.  I got the first chapter and a half down, whereupon real life blindsided me and knocked me right off these tracks and onto the ones which led to the novels Diablos, Suspiria and others.

Truth be told, it's probably just as well that I didn't get to see Dead of Winter through; back then my storytelling ability was vastly overrated by myself, and the bottom line is that just as the young woman was not up to the task of taking on the so-named Face Killer, so I was also not well versed enough in the art of writing to pull it all off.  There's actually at least two more novels that I germinated the ideas for during that time period, and I'm now finally at the point where I would be able to make a success of them.

This brings us back to the idea I threw out with the working title of CSI: Hellraiser, which is how I described it to my wife after a very vivid dream where... well, I'm sure you can guess what the content was, given the title, right?  The problem for this was that I didn't have a central crime, I didn't have a central bad guy, and I didn't have outside element to bring the team first together, and then on the path to the heart of darkness.

Now I do.  Seventeen years later, it's time to fly the black flag and make Dead of Winter the 2009 National Novel Writing Month project.

Very simply?  I'm psyched.  Peace.