Day 3, Starting to get on a roll

Well, it's day 3 and this book is really starting to take shape. I'm getting a feel for the characters and the plots. I'm still working on a B story line, but that will come.

Total word count: 2,003. That's 2,998 behind where I would be if I were keeping up with my 1,667-words-per-day goal. I'm confident that as I get deeper into the story, it will get easier to write more.

Here's a little excerpt, slightly out of sequence. Properly, this will be about halfway through:


"You two are awfully far from home," the guard noted with a suspicious edge.
He rolled their travel papers through his scanner.
"We have business," Skeet said. The scanner let out a quiet beep.
Another uniformed guard appeared out of the windowless building at the edge of the border zone and headed straight for the car. Jo took a deep breath, slowly so as not to attract attention. They were going down in the home stretch. The feds were going to get her after all and she'd spend the rest of her life in a weapons lab a thousand kilometers from nowhere. If she were lucky, she'd only design the delivery systems. That wouldn't be so bad as knowing she had engineered the next improvement in man's race to kill one another. She glanced around the passenger compartment for something fatal. There was nothing, which was just as well. She'd never be permitted to kill herself in a guarded border zone. They’d stop her long before she would succeed. She was of no use to them dead.
The second guard thrust his hand in the window toward Skeet.
"Skeet Hansen. I can't believe it. I've followed the Hansen team since before I was even born. My family has been fans forever. Is everything all right?"
"Everything is fine,” Skeet said. “It’s always great to meet the people I race for.” Jo let her breath out slowly. Skeet was in fan meet'n'greet mode.
"So you're Josephine," the guard continued, looking further in the car. "I've never actually met one of the engineers before. My brother is going to be so jealous when he finds out I've met the Josephine. We once blew up the kitchen trying to turbocharge the vacuum cleaner from one of your schematics. I have all the technical readouts and diagrams. Your designs are just amazing."
Considering the circumstances and the presence of a suspicious border guard eyeing them, Jo found it odd that she was most uncomfortable with the fan’s gushing admiration for her. Most race fans just knew the drivers. The serious fans followed the technical side, but only the most obsessive hard-core raceheads got to the level of engineer groupie. She did nothing to encourage it. She preferred to stay behind the scenes with just her and the cars. Her designs were personal, and several were trade secrets. Having strangers poring over her specs felt more than a little like knowing they looked at nude pinup photos of her. She preferred the nude photos. At least then, she knew what they were thinking and that they didn’t know who she was.