Update:
As of 10:00 p.m. on 11/30 I have 50,016 words.

Morale:
First, yay! I wrote as many words as I was supposed to for the purposes of NaNoWriMo. Now...

The book isn’t done - the last 5,000 words are really more like notes - for the sake of expediency I shifted to third person narrative and focused on getting the plot worked out from beginning to end.

This is actually a good thing - the notes usually expand to three or four times their original length when I get them in finished form, which means that rather than 50,000 words (which is, let’s face it, really more like a souped-up novella) I’ll have - well, it’s not about word count anymore.

Now it’s about staying motivated....

Excerpt (from when I was still writing in complete sentences):

I call David and explain that I won’t back in town until next week.

"Would you please feed my cat?" I say.

"You don’t have a cat," he says.

"Then could you water the houseplants?"

"I could, but it won’t do any good. They all died of neglect," he says. "You neglected them."

"Oh. I hadn’t noticed."

"That," he intones, "is the very essence of neglect."

"Then could you do me a favor?"

"What does her majesty desire?"

"Throw out the houseplants before I get back. I’m sure to notice them now, and it will just be too depressing."

"Will do, YRH."