Month: November 2006

About 15 minutes before Veronica Mars, I finished a scene and checked my word count. It was 50,145. A few days ago, when I checked the offset between OpenOffice’s word counter and NaNoWriMo’s word counter, I calculated that it would be about 144 words off at 50K. I figured, what the heck. I saved it to a text file, scrambled the letters as directed, and uploaded it.

50,000 exactly. I have officially completed National Novel Writing Month.

I have no illusions as to the quality of those 50,000 words. But it’s only a first draft. I’ve never written a first draft of a novel before, so that’s pretty cool!

The main things I’ve learned are:

1. I actually can sit down with no idea of what I’m going to write and come up with characters and a story.
2. Discussing writing issues with another writer (i.e. alenxa), even in vague terms, can help solve problems and crystallize ideas.
3. When I really get going, I can write about 800 words an hour (at least on the computer)
4. I can actually sustain a story over ~110 pages.
5. I need to do a lot more research on medieval Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, and snow.
6. Writing follows a bell curve: it’s hard to come up with ideas when you’re starting out, gets easier in the middle as you start running with things, and when you get near the end, it’s hard to pull everything together and wrap it up. (added)

Next step: sleep. After that, start revising, and figure out how soon I’m willing to let beta readers see it.

Me: Oh, that’s too many syllables for this character!
Katie: What are you trying to replace?
Me: Sanctimonious.

By writing like a madman over the Thanksgiving weekend, I’ve managed to get ahead of the goal, and complete a 47,000-word novel. Unfortunately I need a 50,000-word novel, so I’m going back and looking for things that I glossed over the first time through. There are a couple of spots where I knew I needed more scenes to show character changes, so that’s where I’m going to be focusing.

Still, I’ve got three evenings to write 3,000 words and be done by the 28th, with Thursday as a safety valve. But given the occasional outages at the Nanowrimo website this weekend, I don’t want to take any chances.

Word Count: 47037

Last week my goal for Nanowrimo was to stay right on track. Hit 20K on the 12th, 25K on the 15th, 30K on the 18th. But I realized that the last few days of the month aren’t going to give me much time to write. alenxa and I are going to a concert on the 29th, leaving me only the evening of the 30th to finish the last ~3000 words. Add to that the fact that Nano’s official word counter seems to run a little shorter than OpenOffice’s, and I really need to be aiming for something like 50,500 words.

So my new goal is to finish by the 28th.

For now, that means aiming for 2,000 words a day instead of just 1,700. In some ways it’s easier, since I’ve gotten used to it. But it’s getting a lot harder to sit down and start. I’ll spend all day wanting to get home and start writing, and then I’ll sit down, check my email, read some webcomics, read a couple of blogs… And once I do start writing, I’m letting myself get distracted by web surfing that starts as, say, research on medieval surgery and veers off on a tangent that sucks up an hour reading about the overseas territories of the U.S. (Sometimes, hypertext is not your friend.)

The next few days are going to be tough. Tuesday evening’s out, and I’ve got a project at work due Wednesday that may have me staying late if I can’t figure out the solution earlier. And of course, Thursday afternoon and evening are taken.

I made 32K tonight, though. For the first time, Nano expects me to finish on deadline.

Word Count: 32,101

I didn’t get much written yesterday, but I made up for it today, and passed the 25,000 word mark right on schedule. I am now just over the half-way mark.

A subplot jumped out at me on Monday, and while it’s slowing the A plot down, it seems to be working into things that need to happen for both the A and B plots.

Word Count: 25,032

Just made 20K with 10 minutes to spare. Actually made a bit more than that, as I was sitting at 19,900 at 11:00 and wrote a 400-word scene.

Switching to another progress gauge and going to bed.

Word Count: 20367

Managed ~1600 words and passed the 25% mark in Nano. Which is probably silly to play up, since it’s so close to the 20% mark that I hit yesterday. Still, from 1/5 to 1/4. Next milestone at 1/3. Unfortunately to be on track I ought to hit it by the end of the day tomorrow, and I’ve got ~3500 to go. On the plus side, I’ve got a no-plans weekend to do some catching up. (Oddly enough, the progress gauge seems to think I’m ahead 17 words. I’m not sure how it came up with a goal of 13,105 words based on 9 or 10 days, when the ultimate goal is 50,000 in 30.)

Somehow I was convinced all day today that it was, well, yesterday. This showed up in a number of things, such as forgetting that I needed to update a website for work, and thinking that 1/4 would be on schedule for today. Grumble. Watching Lost on Thursday and Veronica Mars on Wednesday can’t have helped matters.

Word Count: 13,122