Update:
As of 11:59 p.m. on 11/24 I have 29,739 words. But after this post I am going back to work and will drag the word count over 30,000.

Morale:
Improved. The NaNoWriMo pep talk for Week Four (which at this time isn't up on their site yet) actually got me moving again, like a Romanian gymnastics coach shouting, "You can do it!!!" over and over (I swear, that's much funnier in a Romanian accent, so if you didn't read it that way the first time, go back and give it another try).

(Okay, now try, "Nadya never cried over broken ankle, American sweetheart sissy girl! Now get up! You can do it!!")

Also, I realized how completely humiliating it would be to not finish.

Here's a long excerpt, in honor of D, who also helped get me charged up again. E was a big help, too, but he's been a pain in the ass about how I keep forgetting to close the HTML blockquote tags at the end of my excerpts, so I'm only dedicating the tags to him.

Where was I? Oh, yeah, the excerpt:

When I arrive at the shelter on Saturday there are more volunteers than usual, and they’ve brought enough paint and painting supplies to give most of the rooms a fresh coat. The place is in chaos, and there really isn’t anything else to do but help them, so I grab a roll of masking tape and start preparing window frames.

The volunteers are clustered together, elbow to elbow with their paint rollers on the other side of the room. One of them breaks away from the pack – either she’s realized that there are too many of them on one wall, or she sees an opportunity to satisfy her curiosity. Either way, she picks up a roll of masking tape and comes over to help me.

I’ve seen her volunteering at the shelter on weekdays, a prim and careful ash blonde who is aging delicately if not quite gracefully. Something about her thin, pastel-wrapped limbs makes me want to spike the mysterious contents of her omnipresent travel mug with calcium supplements.

I don't know much about her, except that she’s aware I work at the shelter to complete court-ordered community service. She’s aware of this not because I’m wearing orange overalls or an electronic ankle bracelet, but because that kind of information just gets around.

At first we work silently, but I can tell it won’t last – she’s the type who can’t resist striking up a conversation. The only surprise will be in how she does it.

"DUI?" she says, managing to seem sympathetic and disapproving at the same time. I have to give her credit for complexity and directness, if not imagination.

I’m sorely tempted to make up an outrageous story, possibly involving the theft of prize-winning bull semen, but I’m forced to acknowledge that the real story is pretty outrageous, and I settle for telling her that.

"You just hit him with a glass, bam, right in the ear?" Her eyes are wide, and eager for gory details in a way that seems unbecoming in a volunteer.

"Yes. Bam, right in the ear."

"And they arrested you!"

"Yep. And here I am."

"But he was harassing you!"

"Yes, but he wasn’t endangering me. Apparently there’s a substantial difference."

"Well I don’t think there’s much difference." She leans in conspiratorially. "It sounds to me like he had it coming, calling you the ‘c’ word like that."

I shrug my shoulders. Her admiration is making me uncomfortable, and the idea that admiration could make me uncomfortable is discomfiting in itself.

She goes burbling on, riled by the injustice of it all. "I think the real crime is how men think they can treat women so disrespectfully. I think a lot of them could use a lesson like you taught that young man. I bet he’ll think twice before he calls another woman the ‘c’ word, or even the ‘b’ word."

"Well, I hope so, but I’m not sure a few stitches will keep him from being an ‘a’ word."

She blinks twice before letting out a stream of giggles.

"Oh, you’re terrible!" she laughs, and makes a flattering show of regaining her composure. "So," she says, back in conspiracy mode, "How many hours of community service did you get?"

"Two hundred."

"That’s not bad. I mean, if they were going to punish you for it at all, two hundred hours of community service isn’t that bad."

"No, it isn’t. And this place is doing very good work."

"Yes, it certainly is. I like volunteering here. I’ve been volunteering here six hours a week, for, oh, three months now. That’s, what…"

"Seventy-two hours," I say.

"Seventy-two hours," she echoes.

We lapse into silence, painting opposite sides of the window frame. I can tell by her reflection in the glass, and particularly the set of her mouth, that she’s enjoying her daydream.

I really should make sure she knows that if she does take it upon herself to teach someone a lesson, her seventy-two hours of volunteering probably won’t count as time served.