Woooo! Over 20K! This milestone brought to you by fyca, who stopped by on her drive from Seattle to Eugene to look at me very sternly until I hit 20K. She celebrated with me but I could see her mocking my joy from the inside of her NaNoWriMo Winner's Circle! I promised her I'd hit 25K tomorrow, and she knows where I live now, so I had better.

Anyway, this section of the novel is taking on a life of its own, and I'm on deadline, so I think I'll just watch the madness unfold instead of trying to corral it. I barely, barely resisted the urge to make Piper Palin a senator in a throwaway line, since for some reason I ended up dealing with politics in D.C.

Your mission, should you wish to be part of the EPIC* MARS ACTION: What's a good name for a near-future pharmaceutical conglomerate? I don't really need it, but I spent a good 15 minutes trying to think of one and failed.

*epicness is coming, eventually, I hope swear.

So far, my favorite exchange of the "whatever! just type!"-fest of this evening is:

“America loves a dead hooker,” Cara deadpans.

Warren can’t disagree. “Not the best face of our great nation.”

She’s still fussing with prepping her coffee. “Though I was perfectly content with my life before I had ever imagined Don Howard and sex worker in the same sentence. If this is an arranged scandal to bring him down in an election year, couldn’t he have embezzled campaign funds or sold fraudulent real estate futures to the elderly?”

fyca's response was "Oh! That happened to Skinner once already, with the dead hooker." And we laughed for a while about how Skinner's dead hooker was played by Amanda Tapping, because that never gets old.

(I have NO IDEA why any of this is happening. I mean, I HAVE A PLAN, and you should totally read my fabulous future book and find out what that is.)