I just wrote 12,000 words, the first section of my new WIP, The Pond War, what was supposed to be the grand unofficial NaNoWriMo project where I was gonna burn through the process quicker, relatively, than ever before.
But things change, and I'm happy with that. I tried writing the beginning of Pond War a few weeks back, and it wasn't feeling right. I stepped back. I didn't mean to stand back this far, but it ended up being the right thing. I found out what was supposed to happen in the story, everything I was wrong about. These things happen.
I renamed another of my manuscripts during this process. I've never renamed so many stories as all the manuscripts I've written over the last few years. What I published as Pale Moonlight earlier this year had a few different names before that, and I was convinced each time I had nailed it. Holy Men is now known as Metatron, a fundamental shift that also led to some changes within the manuscript itself. I'm hardly impartial in such matters, but I think that's only made that one stronger. Pond War is itself not even this WIP's original title.
I've even revised my end wordcount goal, downward. I did some research and discovered 90,000 is wildly unreasonable for the age group I'm theoretically targeting. It works. Maybe I'm getting lazy, but I'd be happy with 50,000, which at least means that if I'm able to unofficially win NaNo again, I'll be done the first draft entirely by the end of the month. I can be very happy with that.
We'll see.
(Edited to reflect more accurate word totals.)
Just finishing the story with your target word count is a big deal, NaNo or not.
ReplyDeleteThis year, this time, for a variety of reasons, I may indeed be happy with that.
DeleteWell of course you can't do 18,000 words a day. I can do about 1000-1500 words an hour. To get 18,000 then I'd have to type about 18 hours.
ReplyDeleteI came up six thousand short. With proper planning and enough time, it can be done.
DeleteGood luck! I'm struggling to get through my NaNo word count too. I just have to remember that there isn't someone at the end who will shoot me if I don't hit that 50K.
ReplyDeleteThat's the beauty of making it unofficial. I don't even have a meter telling me how far behind I am. Or anyone else, should they care what the NaNo site says about some random writer's progress.
DeleteI quit NaNo officially right in the middle of it. I was out of town on business for a week, and that just destroyed me. So instead of fighting it, I just decided to let it be. No harm in that!
ReplyDeleteI became comfortable with not hitting the mark in November. At this point it's beyond pointless for me anyway.
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