I made it to 5,000 words on my third day, which would have put me in a position to finish on time had I kept up with my current pace. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like I’m going to be quite as lucky this weekend, as today I took a college placement test, and then went out to pick up Sonic Generations for my PlayStation 3 (because apparently Sega actually made an awesome Sonic game again). Tomorrow, I’m going to visit my brother for awhile, which is going to cut even more into my NaNo time. If I’m ever going to beat my old score, I’m going to have to majorly increase my output on Sunday and Monday so that I can at least get over 10,000. (Insert Vegeta scouter-crushing moment here.)

As for my incomprehensible surely-never-to-be-published novel, I’ve already checked off several clichés from The Grand List:

• Hero awakened by mother to start the story/game
• Hero’s hometown village destroyed in spectacular fashion (this is where I am right now)
• Hero discovers mysterious girl he’s ready to help out for no apparent reason despite knowing nothing about her
• Main male hero uses a sword as a weapon
• Main female hero uses a staff (actually a magic wand, but whatever)

Some of them I obviously won’t be able to add due to this not being an interactive medium, but I still plan to cram as many of these tropes/clichés in as I can until the very end. For triple-word-score-cliché points, my story’s “plucky male hero” is modeled directly after Alex, the “default” hero from RPG Maker 2000, right down to his appearance. I knew I’d find a use for that beat-up old program one day.