First Check-In

Hello there, me fellow Half-NaNo-ers!  How'd the first week go? Okay, so technically it's not been a whole week.  But I've decided to do my check-ins/progress reports on Saturday evenings when I've finished writing for the week, and today will be the very first.  (Yes, thank you, my dear.)

In three days I wrote three thousand and twelve words, which puts me right where I wanted to be at the end of this first sort-of-week.  My goal is 1,000 words per day, as I don't plan to write on Sundays or on Thanksgiving Day (hey, every author needs a holiday, and I'll be at my grandmother's all day anyway).

I'm going to ape the Real NaNo's dashboard pages here and record my stats for the week... it's way too much work to do it every day, and frankly I "don't have the time or the want-to."  (That's a Grandma's Attic quote from Ma O'Dell, for your random information.)

Word Count When This Piece of Craziness Began: 8,536
Total Word Count As Of Now:  11,642
Final Word Count Goal: 33,536
Daily Word Count Goal: 1,000
Average Daily Word Count: 1,004
Words Remaining: 21,894

And I'm adding a few statistics of my own...

Character Discovered This Week-
Patsy Rochester, aged four-almost-five.  Okay, so she was in the story before this week.  Picky, picky, picky.  But it was only this week that I finally was able to put a face to the name.  And once I came across this picture of Shirley Temple, it was one of those "well, DUH" moments.  :D  Blogging world, meet Patsy.  Patsy, here are a bunch of fun and crazy people.

Favorite Snippet Written This Week-

Here the handwriting changed to something less neat but much prettier, with bubbles over the I’s instead of dots. This is Francie, and I think it would be much better if we all tell you about ourselves individually instead of leaving the whole thing to Alice.  Thank goodness she’s grown out of the habit of pinching my elbow every time I do something she doesn’t like, or else this part would be pretty sloppy.  Now she’s saying I had no business telling a thing like that to you who hardly even know us, but I believe you should know the worst about people from the start, that way you won’t get an unpleasant surprise.  Now Alice says that last comma should have been a semicolon, and I said that if she wants to dictate every detail of this letter she may as well just write the whole—oh, wait, never mind.

Challenge for Next Week-
Observe the people you see/meet this week--at the grocery store, at the library, at church, whatever--and stick someone into your story as a side character.  Ideally, use someone you don't actually know very well.  Change the name, of course, if you know his/her name, but try to portray him/her as accurately as possible in your story.  The character need only appear once if you want, but just add some flair to your WIP by introducing an interesting "extra."