Well, it's just after eight in the morning, and I've got 1,819 words done so far. Getting up early in the morning is great!
After I hit the Nano 50,000 mark, I had a hard time getting back into it. Hitting 50K was hard, what the hell was I thinking? But I put my butt into the chair and got to work. I'm now just over 57K because of it. Go me!
I seem to have another problem though. I'm churning through my scenes way too fast. A scene that I thought would be about 1500 words turned out to be slightly less than 950. That's a huge difference, and may affect my final word count. Now, granted, I tend to write fairly lean and add description later, but that's not what I've been doing with the first 50K. Why the change? I dunno, maybe because some of the pressure is off.
At any rate, I'm forging ahead. With some luck, by early to mid December I'll be able to put the first draft to bed and let it sit for a couple of months before I start revisions.
Well, I've done it. Averaging about 1149 words per hour over 17 days, I have completed my first ever NaNoWriMo. I have, to say the least, surprised the hell out of myself. I didn't think I was going to get 50,000 words on 30 days, never mind 17.
Over the last 17 days, my typing speed has increased a tad, with the sad side effect of my spelling becoming the worst I've ever seen. It seems my fingers don't move fast enough for the words to come out right. I think I can live with that.
Even though, officially, I have completed Nano, I've decided that I'm going to keep on going until the end of the month. If I maintain this rate, I should have close to 90,000 words by then. Pretty much a complete novel. But, now that the pressure is off, I also plan on actually cleaning the house, cooking some real meals, and generally keeping things nicer for the family. They have, for the most part, been very supportive.
All I can say is… WOW!
Let's try this again. WordPress seems to have misplaced my previous attempt at this post.
Nano is starting slow down. It's become a bit of a slog to sit down every morning and get the words out. It hasn't helped that I ran out of detailed design and had to sit down with the outline to figure out where I had to go.
I've heard the the 2nd/3rd weeks of Nano can be a bit of a slog, and I'm feeling it. My morale is still high, but we'll see how long that lasts.
I've introduced all the major characters now, and have three potential antagonists. I'm keeping the real antagonist a bit of a secret, hoping to throw a wrench into the works in later chapters.
Must… keep… word… count… up…
It's been a few days since I updated the blog with my Nano progress. Overall, I'm ahead of the game. If I stay at my current pace, I should reach the 50,000 word mark around November 20th. If I continue to the end of the month, I should have a little over 80,000 words. We'll see what happens.
The last few days have been interesting, I went through a major slump a few days back. I'd written up to the point of my outline, and all I had left were single line descriptions of some scenes. Not exactly what I wanted to happen, but I was expecting it. Just not so soon. It all resulted in a couple of really tough days, but I managed to work past that, and things went good today.
I am, however, out of detailed scenes again.
I'll spend a bit of Sunday morning fleshing things out a bit more, and the rest of the day trying to hit a high word count.
Today was a good day. The word count was pretty good, but what really made it nice is that the words seemed to flow again. I guess I just like writing action scenes better than anything else. I'm averaging about 1100 words per hour, and 2800 words per day. Which comes out to 2.5 hours per day. Of course, those calculations take into account Saturday and Sunday, when I put in maybe 15 minutes combined. An off the cuff estimate would be closer to 3.5 hours a day of actual writing.
I'm using this NaNoWriMo SpreadSheet to track everything. I wish I could remember where I got it, so I could give credit where credit is due. If you know where it came from, let me know!
Another grueling day. Where did the beautiful flow of words go?
I managed 3334 words today, but I am beat!
Whew, today was a tough day. I'm not sure if it was because I pretty much had the weekend of and was having problems getting back into the swing of thing, or what. I'm still happy with the characters so far, as well as the plot, but each word seemed to be struggle. I'd get five words onto the screen and then go back and edit four of them.
Still, progress has been made. I got 2469 words done today, which still gives me an average of 2521 words per day, which is where I had wanted to be. Still, I've heard about the week 2 and 3 'death marches', and I would really prefer to be much further ahead before any of that stuff hits me.
I figured when I started this that weekends would be difficult. The kids are home all the time and Marnie is as well. Saturday has (un)officially become my day to take off and have coffee with my friends for a few hours, but the rest of the day is family oriented. As is Sunday.
All this sums up to be a slow weekend Nano-wise. I got exactly 0 words on Saturday, but I managed to squeeze in a couple of hours on Sunday to the tune of about 2777 words. That brings my 4 day total to 10236 words. Not too bad a start.
Moral wise, the weekend did bring me down. Just not being able to get the word count in kinda upset me. From here on in, I'll take that into consideration a bit more, and make sure I'm right up to speed during the week.
So far NaNoWriMo is going really well. I'm still not sure where everything is going, but I'm over 4000 words in on day 2, and I still have a few hours left to write today.
I've introduced the protagonist, a 16 year old girl name Kris, and I'm just about to completely destroy her world. I probably spent far too many words on description and info dumping, but it all seems okay for now. I'll fix it all up after Nano. Nano rule number 1 is no editing. Get the words on the paper and worry about editing it all later.
If I can keep going at this rate for awhile, I should be ahead of the game once I hit the week 2/3 doldrums. At that point I'm gonna have to take a day to do some plotting anyway, since I've only plotted about 14 scenes (~ 20,000 words).
I've started using Q10 to do this work. It's actually not bad. A nice full screen editor that removes all outside annoyances. Simply type and go. It does simple editing, but it's not really designed for that. I like it. It's Windows only, but it runs under Crossover Office just fine, except that the real-time stats aren't.
When Nano is done, I'll have to look into writing one of these for native Linux.
edit: Day 2 ended on a bit of a lower note. I got an excellent word count in, but the last hour was a struggle. I prob waited to too late in the day to finish up. I ended up with 4462 new words today, giving me 7359 words in total.
Well, tomorrow is it. NaNoWriMo starts and my life will get very interesting, thirty days of at least 1667 words a day, to complete at least 50,000 words by the end of the month. I'm already feeling stressed out. I was going to take most of October to create an outline and get a good basis for the novel, but that didn't work out too well. So, in the last two days I've managed to cobble together a rough outline with about 50,000 words worth of scenes. Out of those scenes, I've done about 1/3 in any sort of detail. I'll try to add detail this afternoon to the rest, and then the real work begins.
I have some friends that are also doing NaNoWriMo this year. Best of luck to all of you… I know I'll be needing it.
The NaNoWriMo website is slower than molasses in a Canadian winter (to use a bad cliche), soI don't know if I'll be able to get to itat all for the next week. We'll see.
