Camp NaNoWriMo - Day 16

As I've mentioned during past novel writing periods, I always have a crisis of faith about what I'm working on around the two week mark.  Well, I was having it this morning, thinking such thoughts as:

1. What the hell am I doing?
2. Didn't I have enough going on in the past couple weeks that I can excuse myself from writing a novel this time?
3. Do I have any business telling a story this tied to St. Louis?
4. What the hell am I doing?  I didn't write anything yesterday and now I have to write 10k in two days to meet my Monday morning goal of 25k.

Well, I'm over that now. I just wrote a chapter I'm pretty proud of and I'm closing in on 18k.  I'm going to get back to it once I have a bit more caffeine.

I've noticed that I'm working more autobiographical stuff into this one, more than I've worked into anything before, like the time I saw two Galapagos tortoises having sex in the zoo or Jack's car being the rental car I drove to Tulsa and back.  I still haven't decided if Jack and his blonde ex-girlfriend are going to reconcile.  I want them to end up happy but she might need to be the catalyst that sees him finally taking up a gun after years of not carrying one and blowing some mother fuckers away later.  We'll have to see what the characters do.  I'm getting a lot more comfortable with the cast as I go and I haven't introduced them all yet.

The story is progressing pretty well.  Jack's about to get the files from the missing girl's computer courtesy of a hacker calling himself Mantis and the guy who Amber had a restraining order is going to get a visit from my gumshoe very soon.

In other news, I'm probably going to get up at the crack of pre-dawn tomorrow to give the Castor River another go.  I'm really hoping that fucking tree still isn't in the road.