write while writing

Better wordcount on the Sunday, but only because of a late-night push.
7161 at lunch break (the total I'd wanted for the night before)
9525 at dinner break (Chinese takeout)
12012 at midnight.

In past years the pace has picked up on the last day, not only because of omg deadlien! but because I've had a clearer idea of the story-world and plot. The existence of an outline doesn't seem to affect this, though it isn't really a large enough data sample to be draw conclusions from. So we'll see if I can really knock off 8k today--it would be cool if I could.

Plot has not so much diverged from the outline as run parallel to it. Developments have come, but sometimes by different characters than those planned. The fellow who originally commissioned the ghost-snatching has turned out much nastier than first sketched, when he was just envious and malicious, and the girl protecting the ghost-carrier is a tougher customer.
The ghost who organises resistance among the mpd ghost-carriers (thank you, Nick Mamatas) isn't a union agitator this time, but an anarchist with a flair for rhetoric. With his very own nemesis, to be revealed.
And for the first time I don't have an ending, so I can't play my safe game of writing the ending while I'm about halfway through the story, and then writing up to it. I did have a lovely weepy self-sacrificial ending sketched in (okay, it was one line, but it was a pregnant-with-meaning sort of line) but that isn't going to work now.
Plus, I put a gun on the mantelpiece, in the form of an offhand comment (the Red Chamber is haunted, but nobody goes into the Green Chamber), and it has grown from a popgun to a howitzer in the last while, so it must be fired, or the whole wall will crumble under its weight.

At least I've both increased my wordcount from this time in previous years, and had as much of the sleepless experience as my decrepit old self can manage.