Blue Kae

It’s the 15th already. Time is really flying by on me, even faster than I expected it to.

I’m currently at 15,619 words. By the schedule I should be at 25,005 words. You can do the math if you want to see how far behind that makes me, it’s probably not healthy for me to know.

Anyway…. I may (probably) not hit 50,000 by the end of the month, the NaNoWriMo site tells me I’ll be done by December 21st at my current pace.

I’m honestly not too upset about it. I’ve already done better than I hoped, and the story I’m working on has started to come alive on me. Plot problems that I wasn’t sure how to deal with have suggested solutions as I got near them. Dialog has been flowing pretty easily. Regardless of my word count on the 30th, I’m planning to keep plugging away at it until it’s done. The two biggest lessons I’ve learned: spend a little time writing whenever I can and don’t over plan.

Over planning has always been my biggest hurdle. My inclination is to write fantasy, and I’m always especially interested in the world building (probably my frustrated Dungeon Master side). The problem is, that my initial bout of creativity is always spent on the setting. Often I never even get to the story. This month has already shown me, that what I really need to do is sit down and start writing. I don’t need to have the world completely realized to do the first draft, and it’s actually better if I don’t.

I did something stupid while working on NaNoWriMo. I had a chuckle about it afterwards, and I’m sure I’m not the only one who makes mistakes like this, so feel free to share yours in the comments.

I was writing a scene where my main character free climbs a building. When it came time to get him down, I decided to have him rappel. The thing was this character is a thief who prides himself on leaving no trace that he’s been somewhere and no clues to how he got in or out. So I was trying to figure out how he could rappel down a building and not leave behind any equipment. How would he anchor his rope to the roof of a six story building and then recover it from the ground.

This is a fantasy novel, so I figured he would use magic somehow. I started in on writing out how he would do it and then midway through realized I’d forgotten a detail.

I have specific rules in mind for how magic works. In order to keep the story consistent, I was having the character use an enchanted copper disk as an anchor which would adhere via magic to the roof and could be released remotely. Then I realized that meant when he got to the bottom of the building, there would be a palm sized metal disk dropping six stories to either brain my main character or land in the cobblestone courtyard and make an awful racket. Not the kind of thing a stealthy cat burglar would use.

So I ended up dumping a couple of paragraphs and having him free climb back down.

I’m still behind, but I’m not as behind.

By my calculations I should be at 15,003 words. I am actually at 8,336. I wrote 3,270 words today, which is amazing considering my average during the first seven days was 884. It’s also means that I’m only 6,667 words behind now instead of 8,270 behind like I was yesterday and it’s the first day I’ve managed to get closer to being on-schedule.

Tomorrow’s goal is 10k.

Since I’m behind on the recommended word count, I’ve been setting my own goals. Both so I have daily targets to hit and in an attempt to get caught up gradually (rather than trying a single marathon day of writing).

By day 8, I should have 13,336. My goal for the weekend was 5k, but I ended up stopping 600 words short. I decided to take a couple of hours where I’d intended to write and play some video games instead, and I’m glad I did. I hadn’t played at all last week, so I feel pretty good about treating myself on Sunday.

My goal for today was 8k words. I squeezed in a bit of writing today during breaks at work, and I’m at 5065 words now. I doubt I’ll make a full 8k tonight, but I feel like I’ve been making steady progress so I’m pretty pleased, I’ll be happy with 7k by the time I go to bed.

It’s November and that means it’s National Novel Writing Month. This is my second year participating in NaNoWriMo. I didn’t really have a goal last year, I only decided to participate after the contest had already started and I’d didn’t really focus on it as much as I should have. Despite all that, it was still a good learning experience for me.

This year I’m taking it more seriously. I may not make it to 50,000 words and win, but I’m at least going to dedicate time nightly to giving it a real shot.

Today is day seven, and so far I’ve been doing OK, which means much much better than last year but not as good as I’d like. The first three nights, I got a late start and generally didn’t sit down to write until around 11:30 or later. I’ve also be recovering from being sick, so I’ve only been able to spend about an hour each night before staggering off to bed. The first night I struggled to even get the 603 words down, and the second night was not much better. The third night ended with me getting stuck at the first major plot point of the book, it’s the event that initiates the major conflict of the story, and I just couldn’t figure out how to get it started.

So on day four, I was 3000 words behind where I needed to be, stuck on the plot, and just not sure how to move forward. I didn’t want to take a night off from writing though, because I knew that would break my momentum and likely turn into two nights off, or a week, and before I’d realize it there would be no catching up. Instead of just staring a my screen, I decided to change tactics. I started a new text file and started writing the first thing that popped into my head, which turned out to be a monologue by my main character. While writing like this I came up with how to get around the plot issue I was dealing with. The other thing that happened, is my brainstorming session turned into my story. After an hour and a half, I had 900-ish words and had actually moved the story past where I’d been in my previous writing.

This was great, since I’d finally found a good head-space to write from, but it did mean dumping the 2000 some words I’d written in the first three days from a third-person perspective and starting over with what I’d done in first-person from day four. Decisions decisions.

In the end, I decided to stick with the first-person work I’d done and since then I’ve managed to catch up and pass my original count and hit 3639 words.

I’ve kind of broken a rule of NaNoWriMo by starting over, since what I ended up doing was basically a rewrite. The general idea is just to keep plunging forward and leave any changes for after the 30th, but I hadn’t intended to do more than just type out some thoughts in an effort to work through my plot a bit. I’m still not rereading anything I’ve written or changing anything except for the occasional typo.

In case you’re curious, I’m working in WriteMonkey and using DropBox to keep the text file automatically backed up. I’m keeping notes in Google Docs. I’m reading Chris Baty’s No Plot, No Problem and Doyce Testerman’s This is How I Get It Done for advice and motivation. I have a copy of Lawrence Watt-Evans’ Second Draft printed and hanging above my monitor.