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.

Punctuation is everything!

Arrrr Matey!  Did yer know it was Talk Like a Pirate Day today?  All yer landlubbers out there kin talk like a Pirate all ye want.

I'll be wearin' me pirate hat all day, and if anyone laughs, I'll be makin' a meeting wit' you and Davey Jones! 

(Holiday Post #2)

I've actually completed draft 0 of my novel, and it clocked in at a pretty low word count.  Fortunately, this is pretty normal for me.  Even with a rather extensive outline (about 41 pages of it), my 'Draft 0's' tend to be about getting the ideas down on paper (plot) rather than telling an intriguing, descriptive story.  The next version, a true first draft, should be well over my projected word count, at which time I start pruning and cutting and tightening. 

It is at the end of the first draft where I will have considered myself actually having written a novel.  So, for the sake of record keeping, Draft 0 is at 34,000 words, which equates to 154 pages and an average word count of 639 words per scene (53 scenes).  For draft 1, there are a couple of scenes I'll be removing since they don't really move the story forward.  Plus, there is a new sub-plot I want to add, with will increase the scene count by about 10.

I have no idea if any other writers out there use the same method as I do, but this seems to work for me.