Days 3-10, Part 2

10,111 words total. I’d enjoy coming back to parts 13 & 14 (Last Man Standing & Small World) one day to rewrite. The first bit (Chance Encounter) is quite weak. That’d go entirely in an edit, I suppose.

Days 3-10, Part 1

6,991 words total. 

 Having spent a lot of the week ill with the ‘flu, I’ve had to really step up the pace to keep up. I’m going to split what I’ve done since getting ill into three posts to make it more manageable to read. In this section, part 9, entitled Awful, is something I’m actually quite pleased with. It could use tightening and so on, but it’s bits like that I enjoy writing and remind me why NaNo is worth bothering with at all.

 

Day 2

903 words tonight / 4,006 words total. 

A real quick one today – I started just before 1am, it’s 1:49am now but I’ve managed to bang out 903 words. A power-write! That’s put me over the 4,000 word mark, which is up on where I should be after two days and about on par with where I was this time last year.

I only wrote one scene. It’s about Sara and it’s basically just a personal rant. I like cold winter mornings, and I hate having to work and the London Underground, so I wrote about those things. I also wanted to sketch the character for my own reference, too: she’s going to develop into someone who’s eternally stuck in a rut, cares about some things to the point of obsessive / compulsive but doesn’t care about other things at all, and believes most people have their priorities all wrong.

Also, she hates being told what to do but almost always does as she’s told which I’m hopefully going to be able to build on as I go through. 

Day 1

3,103 words.

The quality is shocking, no two ways about it. I feel quite deflated. It now feels like if I’m going to finish, it’s going to be a really hard, thankless slog. I can’t remember if I felt like this at this point last year. Maybe. One thing I do know is that having a young baby does reduce writing time considerably.

I suppose I’m going to have to take NaNoWriMo in the spirit it’s intended and be happy with quantity, at the expense of quality if needs be. And from that point of view, over 3,000 words in a little over 24 hours ain’t bad going at all.

Anyway, here it is: Day 1:

 

Vehemence

To be precise, there is two hours and thirteen minutes left until lots of people in my time zone begin penning the opening words of  their NaNoNovel. I’m still banking on my half-a-sort-of-plot to get me through.

Enigma

I’m one day away from beginning NaNoWriMo 2007 and I’ve still only got the loosest idea for half a plot. Partly this is the fault of Dragons’ Den, which was on last night. 

Monument

I’ve dedicated a lot of time to thinking about my NaNoWriMo plot in the past few days. To the outside world my plotting may look like the gormless middle-distance staring of a vacant mind, but behind the dim-witted facade, the cogs have been turning.

Scary

Some good news.

I predict…

Most talented writers I know have always written and always wanted to be writers. I never wanted to be a writer when I was young. Maybe that’s why I’m not a particularly good writer.

The Writing Window

Things can change considerably in a year.

While writing Some Solitude for a Social Species for NaNoWriMo last November I found out my girlfriend was pregnant. Now we have a two month old baby. There are many, many reasons why I love having a baby, but I’m not going to go into them here. What I want to think about is how I’m going to manage writing 1,667 words per day under the circumstances.

I don’t know if many people watch Bringing Up Baby on C4.

Recap of NaNo ‘06

Last year I won NaNoWriMo with Some Solitude for a Social Species. It was a good NaNo title. Six words without even getting to page one.