Not dead yet

I haven't written anything here (whichever journal service you're reading this on) since... June. I'm getting progressively worse at keeping these things up to date.  :(

I'll skip the knitting update, it will give me something to do later; hopefully not six months from now.

So, since last time I wrote:

• I went to Anthrocon and had a good time.
• I visited family, which involves driving 888 miles one way, seeing all the relatives, and driving 888 miles back.
• I received a very generous and very early Christmas present after I returned home; that will get another post.
• I honestly can't say where several weeks went.
• Some of them were spent going "will I or won't I" in regard to NaNo.

Yes, I did NaNoWriMo again.

It actually went very, very much better than last year.

I had to restart it. My first attempt would work better for an opening to a sequel, which I don't have a plot for, so that was a short road to nowhere.

I managed to get to about 35k on my second attempt before getting horrifically stuck. I flailed around for a few days and ended up writing out a time line of events in the two locations which helped a lot, largely by making me go "but why did they do this/did that happen".

Eventually I realized I had started at the wrong point in time again. So I jumped back and started writing another beginning, but this one should hook up at some point in the middle of the story to my second stab at the idea. 

I still have a list of "why" to work out, but it's not the worst 50k I've ever written.