It’s down to the wire on National Novel Writing Month, and I’m 3,834 words shy of complete. Yes, I still have 27+ hours to go, but the fact is I’m in the flabby part of a novel: the midpoint, the belly, the chapter in which (since I’m writing Lit.Fic.) my character’s past story-line and her present circumstances should reach their emotional peak. Here marks the inner battle from which she’ll either emerge wounded but determined, or she’ll tuck tail and turn into someone who should have died on Page One.

Perhaps taking a week off to go do family stuff was not the best thing. I certainly wished NaNo was scheduled so as not to coincide with such things, but I knew the deal when I signed up. That doesn’t restore the momentum I lost in that week, though, nor does it refresh in my mind the intimacy I’d developed with my character until then.

I’m struggling, but I’m determined to finish. Even so, I can’t help noticing how much harder it is writing through this part of the book.

I mentioned this to VH a moment ago after he’d asked, for the third time, whether I was going to hit my 50,000 word mark tonight as I’d hoped.

“No,” I replied. “I’ll be glad if I can knock out another 500 words tonight, really. Right now, it feels like I’m ripping each one out of my head.”

He fixed me another martini and set it down carefully, always on guard against errant drops, he is. “Maybe that’s why novelists consider what they do to be work,” he said.

Damn. I hate it when my husband is right.