There’s officially twenty-four hours and twenty-four minutes left of this year’s NaNoWriMo. I’d feel pretty good about hitting the target if I didn’t have to work and sleep during a bit of that…

I’m more or less – probably coming down on the less side – on top of things, though. I managed to get my head down in this last week (pro-tip: neglect all of your loved ones!), and my current count is 45,240 words with 4,760 to do tomorrow. That’s… doable? Probably doable. Maybe.

This has been the week of questioning everything: does this characterisation work? Do I have too many sarcastic characters? What rhymes with ‘cloud’? Why do no good words rhyme with ‘cloud’? Should I really be using NaNoWriMo to write parody rap songs about clouds?

You’ve all been there. I’m even questioning my out-of-context excerpt:

A girl stood, slumped at the back of the food stall. She was wearing a thick, puffy coat, lined with fur, over an apron that looked a bit too much stained for what little food there was on display.

She’d scraped her hair up into a high ponytail so her large gold – or, at least, gold-coloured – hoop earrings were showing. They reached her shoulders.

She had a thick gold chain around her neck that said ‘princess’ in a chunky, cursive font. The i was dotted with a grimy gemstone.

She snapped her chewing gum loudly, her mouth open, watching Cuthbert as he gave her the old Tattersall once-over.

‘Paint a portrait, it’ll last longer,’ she said. ‘Ten gold pieces to paint it. Twenty for paints. Fifty for the paper.‘

Though it is highly questionable, right enough…