Nano going great!

I'm doing quite well with my nanowrimo page counts in my novel, the working title of which is The Pleasure Palace, and am up to 14,000 words as of yesterday's write-in at Cafe Pergolesi. It takes me a little while to get the page count every day, as I am actually drafting my second book. Parody (in the middle of a love story) can be quite fun and I am amazed at the many threads I can weave into this. It's far lighter than The Strega's Story, though it touches greatly on issues of gender and sexuality, themes I haven't yet tackled as much in my prose.

It's fun to just simply write, and the camraderie of writing with others is also fun on the few occasions I have been able to get over to write-ins. There's a book within a book--the male protaganist, Martin, is a local writer who publishes his zombie and werewolf and vampire stories though a local small press and has a devoted cult following--really, like a zombie cult, just kidding--in his town and immediate environs, shamelessly based on Santa Cruz. In the time frame of the novel, Martin is writing yet another horror potboiler (which we get to read as he works on it). Martin's love interest teaches English and creative writing at the local university and of course, thinks people who write stories about zombies and werewolves and vampires are hacks (which I don't, but she does).

I'm having about as much fun writing Martin's book-within-a-book (which he calls Attack of the Killer Zombie Pirates) as writing the rest of this shamelessly chick lit book (really, the genre is actually--and a bit sexist-ly so--called "hen lit," as the people are in my age group). Heck, why not? And it's fun! It's probably the most fun I've had writing since fifth grade, when I wrote stories AND illustrated them with crayons.

But for now, it's grading time.
Happy writing to all the nano people out there! It's proving to be quite a fun experience!