OK, not even 800 words for the weekend. This is bad. But I acomplished some other things, so that is good.

I did let myself be distracted by an interesting idea. See, this year I'm writing this more or less post by post in a quick Drupal site I set up. (I set up Drupal sites all the damn time for work, so it's no problem to throw together something quick for personal use.) At least, the original idea was for it to be a quick and simple site. Just a blog and the story.

That idea lasted until I got sick of flipping back through the blog or story posts to find character, business and other names and facts. So I've come up with a set of content types that will interrelate and keep track of a number of things.

First and foremost, I'm going to have a full listing of every character that gets introduced and reference the story posts they appear in. Same for businesses or organizations.

Then there will be a running list of annotated reference links that will generate both from blog posts and in-story citations (a real benefit of writing in a "live" environment is the ability to link what may be esoteric information--like acronyms or historical references--to deeper information on other parts of the Web, giving the reader a chance to gain a deeper understanding of the writing).

I started to build all that out on Saturday. When I should have been writing (but after I caught up a little on some other projects I have promised to other people).

So, yeah, still way behind, but attempting to make the whole process more efficient. Talking with a writer buddy of mine over the weekened, he expressed some interest in the system. So there's a good chance that once I have the functions ironed out, I may see about packaging it up and making it available to anyone who wants it. Open source is a wonderful thing, and I'm more than happy to share.

Anyway, in the hunk of story that I did write this weekend, we see a distinct change in the character of Solomon Mercado. He's not a desk jockey like I originally thought he was going to be. Nope. He's some sort of test pilot for BI. And either current or ex military, at that. Who knew? Amazing what comes up.

Also, the story is now most cerainly sci-fi. Any time battle mechs make an appearance, that pretty much cements at least part of the genre.

I'll be adding more to this chapter Monday. At best it's only half as long as it should be, so it'll at least meet the minimum word count for  single day. Now I just have to squeeze an extra, what, 6K or so words into the next week... assuming I don't fall further behind?

Yeah... there's a reason I renamed the subdomain I'm using from "nanowrimo.durosia.com" to "fiction.durosia.com"... I have a feeling this project won't be sensibly completed by the end of the month. Which, really, is just fine.