Two plus two is ten

I have so many half-finished LJ entries lying around that it's not even funny. That's what happens when my brain gets stuck in the NaNoWriMo place, I guess.

The book is actually going pretty well, to the point where I'm giving it a metaphorical side-eye, like, I know you want to start being awful, book, so why hasn't that happened yet? I went with the zombie apocalypse story and I'm still on track with my word count even though I skipped a few nights: once because I went to a Portland Art Museum member's dinner and came home a wee bit too tipsy for writing, and another earlier this week because I'd taken Ivan to the vet that day and some of the news kinda bummed me out. But I managed to churn out a decent amount over the past two days and now I seem to be caught up again. Hooray, and stuff.

It's weird -- part of me is all excited because I think I'm actually going to reach 50,000 words this year, but this excitement is tempered with the knowledge that the story won't even be close to finished at that point. I mean, I just passed 18,000 words and I haven't even gotten the characters out of the city yet! Their journey north and all the shit that goes down as they travel is supposed to comprise the bulk of the novel, so every once in a while I can't help but feel a little intimidated by everything still looming ahead of me.

I don't entirely know what to make of the fact that I've already killed off half my working cast and yet none of those deaths were directly attributable to zombies. IN A ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE NOVEL, what the fuck. I also managed to kill off a character who wasn't supposed to die until the novel's halfway point, so...now I have to figure out what to do with the subplot I had planned for him. This is why I'm glad I keep my outlines flexible. Hypovolemic shock doesn't care about your carefully constructed outlines! Hypovolemic shock does what it wants!

("Hypovolemic shock" is more fun to say than "complications from blood loss". Please don't judge me.)

Anyway, I've been sending the draft to Nate every time I hit a 10-20 page mark and he says he likes it, so that's been kind of nice. It's a lot harder to convince myself that I suck when I have an outside party asking me to write more because he enjoys reading it. *hearts*

It's funny -- you'd think I'd be sick of zombies by now, what with ZomBcon (I GOT TO SHAKE GEORGE ROMERO'S HAND ANJNDBHDBHSJDJWJKAL!!!!!!!) and The Walking Dead and Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare and my NaNoWriMo novel and all, but...nope, I'm still feeling the freaky little bastards. As I've written about before, I think it's because they're one of the few monsters that genuinely frighten me. Ghosts and demons are scary mostly in the context of whatever book or movie or tv show they appear in, and poor werewolves and vampires have been defanged to the point of ridiculousness, but your dead loved ones coming back to life in order to eat you? That's scary shit right there.

On a much more depressing note, I have to bring Ivan back to the vet's today for a recheck. He's had complications involving his right eye and I don't think it's doing any better than it was earlier this week, and the whole thing is just really devastating and sad. He was doing so well, you guys, for such a long time, but in the past few weeks I feel like we've shifted into a phase where things are starting to get worse and it fucking kills me. I'm not ready to lose him yet and he's not ready to go, from the way he's acting, but he's obviously in more pain and discomfort than he used to be -- even with the meds -- and it makes me so sad that we're now at the "evaluating his quality of life" stage of things. Right now, his quality of life is still pretty good -- aside from his eye, that is -- but if his eye doesn't improve then he's going to start going downhill really fast and we're eventually going to reach a point where it would be cruel not to let him go.

This is something I don't like thinking about.

He's in my lap right now, purring his heart out. Oh, cat. :(