14 November, 2006
NaNoWriMo: At the end of Week Two
Tomorrow will officially mark the end of Week Two of NaNoWriMo, but I will be at the East Bay group's Halfway Party gorging on chips and salsa (and cheese enchiladas!) and tipping back a celebratory margarita or three, so I won't have the chance to write the update. Or much of anything else.
Word count-wise, I'm kicking it. I had a couple of very productive writing days over the weekend, that blew a big hole in the word count. The target for the end of Week Two is 25,005 words; As of tonight I'm at 30,265. Yay me.
Before I go on, though, I have to give props to Gwen and Tim, who sent me one of those email/MySpace/NameYourSocialSiteHere type of surveys on Saturday. Because I had had two consecutive shitty writing days (and actually fell asleep at 8:15 p.m. Friday night and didn't write a damn thing!), I cursed my lack of discipline and filled it out instead of working on my novel. I made a joke at the top of it along the lines of maybe I should add this to my novel since I needed the word count. Then it hit me: These surveys would be a great way to reconnect with my characters (whom I was no longer on speaking terms with by Saturday morning). So I pasted a copy of it in BBEdit and wiped out all of MY answers and then I took my three main characters and did a survey in each of their voices. It was a huge help in getting my novel back on track, so THANK YOU GWEN AND TIM!!!
As I head into the last 1/3 of my (as-yet untitled) novel, it has taken an unexpected dark turn. It needed to, but I was still surprised at how it came about. There's one more dark corner that I have to nudge my characters into, and I'm really not sure how my main character is going to handle that yet.
But, thus far, this novel is much, much closer to being something that I might actually let someone else read a draft of (after I do a fair bit of revision). Last year's effort is buried deep on one of my hard drives where it will remain until, with my last ounce of strength, I will reach over from my death bed and hit the delete key.
If I can maintain my momentum, I hope to be finished with the novel in time for Thanksgiving dinner!
P.S. Blogger is thoroughly being a shit tonight.
~~ victoria on 10:10 PM ~~ 1 comments
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Glad to be of help ;)
By
Tim, at
1:42 AM