So I'm ticking off the seconds until the Nintendo Wii is released on November 19th. Mark your calendars everyone! It's going to be a mad rush to the shops at midnight to be the first to pick one up. Having been unable to secure a preorder, I've begun to work on some plans to make a trip to my nearby city.

We've got Wal-Mart, Meijer, Target, Sears, Sam's Club, Best Buy and EBGames. Hopefully one of these stores will have one for sweet little ol' me. (Probably not EBGames, though.) I'm a bit strapped for money at the moment, so I think I'm only going to pick up Zelda: Twilight Princess and Excite Truck for now. Maybe just Zelda, since I still have to get an HDTV.

Yeah... I just realized today that I have two weeks to shop for a TV and for to get here if it's an online purchase. I think I've picked one out. The Samsung LN-S2738D 27" Widescreen LCD HDTV. It's nice and cheap (relatively speaking) for a 720p set, which is all I want/need right now. I don't really want to spend a whole lot on a 720p set and turn around in a couple of years and get a 1080p set. Hopefully someone in my family will help me front the costs for it so I can get it early, and then pay them back. I think I might have to get the thing online and have it shipped here. Nobody carries this model anymore. All these stores have to carry the latest and greatest... You know there ARE people out here who don't want the latest and greatest and most-wallet-busting stuff!

I think I might plan ahead and get myself a Sam's Club membership before the 19th. They say Sam's Club is a great place to find new consoles because while everyone's lining up outside Best Buy, Sam's Club sits empty because the membership system keeps people from just walking in off the street.

So... Nintendo Wii... extra controller... Zelda and maybe Excite Truck... 27" widescreen HDTV... all on or before the 19th. In the meantime, I've got a novel to write. Which, I have to admit, I've only got about 200 words written today. Not exactly the 5,000 words I'd planned on, since I had an icky night's sleep last night. (I think it was the pizza.) But yeah... I'm gonna try to write some more before early sleep-time.

So I just noticed that the little word progress meter on the right-side menu broke the web page in Internet Explorer, so I was forced to remove it for the benefit of those not yet enlightened enough to be using Firefox instead. So that's been fixed. Or... At least fixed in the sense that there's no problem on my site anymore.

Also, I noticed that my server didn't properly adjust for Daylight Time Savings. (Ugh.) So I had to go back through some of my latest posts and subtract an hour. So folks, I really wasn't up as late as the last posts tried to tell you I was. But those are fixed now, too. I need to figure out a way so it adjusts automatically... Or at least give myself a warning.

So here I am... wrapping up day three. 10,035 words so far. I'm a tad over 20% complete! In three days. I think that's a good sign. See, the Nintendo Wii comes out on the 19th. That means I need to write about 2,632 words a day. But according to my chart, I've been writing about 3,000 words a day (or more). So I'm well ahead of schedule! I almost burned myself out tonight by straining for the 10,000th word. You can feel your brain being stretched while you're grabbing for anything that seems remotely related to the paragraph you've got written already. They said there'd be a lot of junk by the time you got done... That's for sure!

Some people have told me that it's hard to keep up the pace I'm going at. Naaah. Of course, these were people who hadn't even started yet. So that was interesting. I'll get 50,000 words by the end of the month if it KILLS me. Which it won't, because I'm having a blast and 3,000 a day is no sweat. Yes, I'm bragging. What can I say? It's my blog and I'm finally getting something done that I've always wanted to do, and I'm having fun, and it's not hard since I've already had story outlines for months. It's sort of like saving up for rested experience in Warcraft. You don't do anything for a couple of weeks, and when you get on to play, your character is all rested up and you get double experience for everything you do and you fly through the level! Of course... there's always the chance you run out of rested experience and you start going slow again. Hopefully I don't hit that particular snag in writing.

One thing I've noticed though... 50,000 words isn't nearly enough to actually finish the book I have planned, much less the entire story. I'm thinking maybe something like Lord of the Rings... A trilogy of three fat books and then be done. Or maybe five slightly smaller books and have prequels and in-between stories like Dragonriders of Pern seems to do. I thought about going for a Chronicles of Narnia style, where you've got seven small books, but I don't think I'd be able to cram a story into a Narnia-sized book. That'd be a bit much, I think...

Yes, I'm daydreaming. But hey, as I've always said, one of my life goals is to write a commercially published novel, just to be able to tell people "yep, I've written a novel". It's going to be original, too... Not some stereotypical Lord of the Rings rip-off. (I'm looking at YOU, Wheel of Time!) You'll see! People will be ripping ME off by the time I'm done! (Oh, wouldn't that just be awesome.)

Anyway... I took a nap at like... 7pm tonight... so I'm all awake right now. But I think I'm gonna take my shower and head to bed anyway. Starting to get sleepy and I want to try for 5,000 words tomorrow, since it's a weekend and I don't have any Peter Heck Show to hog my afternoon. (Haha, joking.) The NaNoWriMo people say to try to get a 5,000 word weekend... 5,000 words in three weekend days? Pleeeeease. Should be able to get another 10,000 at least! Think maybe I could get to 25,000 by Sunday night? Hmm... That might be pushing it.

Ya'know, I could really do this for a living. Heard it's really not good money, though. More of a second job than an only-job sorta thing. Capella told me some fellow who writes Star Trek novels said the only way to make a real living off writing books alone is to release one a month. Ouch. That would just... Literally hurt my brain to try.