It’s March 1st, 2015. Eight weeks. Two months. Fifty nine days. Things are looking up! It’s time for the Week Eight update on my 1K a Day Challenge!

Days 53 through 59 have been successes, with a minimum of 1,000 words per day written. On average, this week has been better than the last several, with both a 2K+ and a 3K+ day!

Stats for Days 53 to 59:

Day 53 – 1306 words
Day 54 – 1158 words
Day 55 – 1150 words
Day 56 – 2140 words
Day 57 – 1040 words
Day 58 – 1309 words
Day 59 – 3121 words

Total count for the year thus far is 83,653 words. Average daily word count is 1,417 words. Gridfall is at 81,340 words. Based on my projections for the story, it is 40% finished.

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Last week I talked about a rival faction our characters are involved with, the Marauders, or Mauders. This week I promised to talk about the Everguard, a friendly faction to our Rebuilders.

The Everguard are comprised of a loose coalition of survivors, many with medical experience, mostly just people in need of medical attention. The Everguard have taken up residence in the Guardians of Life Hospital, one of the hospitals in the southern business district, south of the Rebuilder territory, far from Marauders and insulated by distance and the Rebuilders from those enemy factions.

The people in charge of the Everguard are Everett and Jacqueline Ames. Jacqueline was the hospital administrator before Gridfall, and she has named their group after her husband. They have relative peace, being that they are well-defended and insulated from the outside world, and that they have an abundance of medical supplies and the medical knowhow to apply it. They are in demand, trading with the Rebuilders and the WAY.

Kurt joins the Everguard as a grid emissary from the Rebuilders. The Guardians of Life hospital, and truly any facility that must have backup power, is in possession of a backup grid system, that can run independent of the greater grid. If it worked. Kurt discovers that there’s a key component of the backup system missing, but he doesn’t know what it is and must try to discover it if he has any chance of bringing the grid back online, even in a small capacity.

They’re good people in the Everguard. But it’s not just because he had a hand in Gridfall that spurs Kurt on to fix the grid. There are patients that desperately need the machines powered by the grid in order to recover. He is pulled in many directions as his actions will effect all those around him, and not everyone is so pleased to bring the grid back online…

That’s it for the major factions that are to be dealt with in Gridfall. I don’t know just yet what kind of world-building I’ll do next week, but it might have less to do with the story overall and just fleshing out the technologies of the world a bit more pre-Gridfall.

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And remember, writing is a skill. So write the hell on, writers.