I made an excel sheet for myself to track my novel's progress. Actually I found a ready-made sheet online and tweaked it to my purposes, but that's just as good.

Anyway, according to the chart, if I keep up my daily quotas, I will reach my goal of 80,000 words before March 31st. This may not mean reaching the end of the novel - I may discover at that point that I won't reach the end until 90,000 or 100,000, but even in that case, I can still hope to complete my first draft sometime in April, which definitely looks good to me.

The spotlight in these past few chapters has definitely been on Amanda (and on Elin to a slightly lesser extent). This is as it should be, but it's also making me realise that I'm going to have to go back and emphasise Amanda a lot more in the opening chapters, because as written, Sean may be a little over-emphasised. I will not be going back and changing this until the end, however (when I'm sure I'll have even more ideas about how the opening needs changed).

I've done my NaNo quota today, but I'm ready to do a bit more, so I'm not posting my daily results yet.

What I am posting is a little bit about the novel's next location.

I now have three of the four pilgrims in my story. Monkey and Xuanzang are more or less the same as in Journey to the West, though Monkey is distinctly less powerful in my version. Aunty Zhu is my story's version of Zhu Bajie, the pig, who is male in the original. (Zhu means Pig in Chinese).

The fourth pilgrim in the original is a river demon called Sha Wujing. Originally I was going to have him appear in Guilin, which is a nasty nasty city (but with one of the nicest surrounding countrysides in China). Then I remembered a place I'd read about called Fengdu, the City of Ghosts, somewhere along the Yangtze river. Fengdu is a Taoist necropolis modelled on the Chinese Hell, and thus seems like the perfect place to set a chapter. I read about this place years ago, and always wanted to visit. The only problem is, it was recently flooded permanently due to the Three Gorges Dam project, and now most of it is underwater (though parts of it on top of hills are still above the water)

I certainly can't think of a better place for them to find their river demon :)