5k on Day 2

Well, Day 2 of NaNo is slipping away, and I'm happy to say that I have 5,000 words to show for it! Things have been going pretty smoothly, though I'm not sure what to think about what I've written thus far. It's neither good nor bad on the grand scale, I suppose--just average. The biggest problem I have with speed writing is that I end up using the same words over and over again. It drives me nuts. I'm slowly making a list of words, though, that I want to use sometime during the month, words that I came across when I was doing research and of which I had to look up the meaning. So far I have "desultory" and "empirical." I also want to use "imbue" somewhere. These are special words that I'll only be able to use once in the whole story. You see one of these words a single time and, well, let's just say that you're bound to notice when it's used a second time, and ready to slaughter the author (me) when you see it a third time.

When I stopped at the conclusion of chapter 2 this evening, I left my characters seasick aboard LSTs. LST stands for "landing ship tank" (it's a kind of ship), but people called it "large slow target" instead. As soon as I read that, I knew it had to go in my novel. A sailor told gullible Maureen that's what it was . . . and she was a little confused until a certain pointy-nosed nurse told her otherwise. I thought it was pretty funny myself, but, then again, I wasn't the one who was seasick.

Trey, Ed, Sheila, Julie, and Maureen are all on their way to Sicily, along with an entire fleet of military personnel and the pointy-nosed nurse who I just discovered today and whose name I still don't know. They left Bizerte at about 1400 hours (2:00 p.m.) and will probably arrive at the southwestern shore of Sicily tomorrow (let's pretend for a moment that tomorrow is Tuesday, July 14, 1943) around the same time. Sicily is only sixty miles north of Tunisia, but I guess ships, and maybe LSTs in general, are slow (hence "large slow target").

Meanwhile, I'm hoping to get more research done. The book I bought as my core research--The Day of Battle--is a great read. I'm loving it. Already I've learned far more about the people, places, and events of Operation Husky than I ever imagined. Probably the most outstanding observation I've made is that General Patton really needed to learn some manners. Even if he didn't, he at least could have curbed his profanity. And as for the slapping incidents-- Well, we'll talk about that later.

Day 2 is closing in glory. I can only hope that tomorrow will be the same. When I'm at Honkerbean's, I might just get to write 3k. That would put me at 8k. All in all, it's 50k or BUST this month!