Assuming you read my first post here in OW — and you did, of course, because you are smart and sexy and read really fast — you will have noted that I am participating in National Novel Writing Month for the first time ever.
Allow me to explain why I never NaNo’ed before.
Writing 50,000 words in 30 days is insane. Plus, writing anything without intense editing as I go is completely contrary to my working style. Besides which, November already goes by so quickly that I’m convinced Father Time secretly shorts all of us a couple of days every single year. And did I mention? Writing 50,000 words in 30 days is insane.
Now let me explain why I suddenly up and decided to do it this year.
Apparently, I am insane. Plus, I decided that going way, way, waaaaay out of my comfort zone might turn out to be a good and empowering thing. Besides which, it’s only 30 days — fewer if I’m right about that Father Time thing — so I said to myself, how freakin’ hard could it be? Thirty days, pfft! Piece of cake.
Omg, this is so not any kind of baked dessert.
In terms of word count — currently at 12,778 — I’m actually not in bad shape, but there are some tough times a’comin’.
For one thing, I keep writing late at night, but the NaNo clock clicks forward a full day at midnight. So, in terms of where I should be in the work, I have been consistently running a day late and several thousand words short. Let me remind you, there is no half-winning. “Win or win not,” as Yoda say. At midnight on Nov. 30, everybody’s NaNo clock runneth out.
Also, I’m increasingly sleep-deprived. Last night, this contributed to the worst file-loss disaster of my writing career. I managed to trash the 1,500 words that I had just finished writing.
They say that sort of thing builds character.
I can only tell you that it hurt so much I felt alternating waves of hot and cold running through my body for about five minutes before I could even think to look for backup files, which turned out to have been created before the evening’s work … and right after I trashed it. (As you can imagine, autosave and autobackup are now set to OVERKILL.) I chose to stay up and rewrite the lost scenes last night, because you fall off that horse, you’d damn well better climb back on.
So that’s where things stand. But not to worry, there’s much happier news coming. Because, whether or not I “win,” this is turning in one of the greatest writing experiences I’ve ever had. And I’m going to tell you all about tomorrow. (Or the next day. I really have to get that word count up!)
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dh
