Tuesday, November 8, 2011

NaNoWriMo: Week 1 (boring post)

I mentioned in my introduction post to this blog that I probably wouldn't be writing all that much during the month of November because of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month, or http://www.nanowrimo.org/, also #NaNoWriMo on twitter.com), but I found myself wanting to chart my progress here where I can use more than 140 characters at a time.

(If you only want 140 characters at a time, you can follow my twitter, @MissyKirtley. If you are a part of the activity yourself, you can add me as a friend here: http://www.nanowrimo.org/en/participants/missykirtley )

As of this moment, I have 27,232 words on my way to 50,000 by the month's end. After only one week of writing, I consider my word count to be fairly impressive. Though, I'm a little terrified that I'm already 2/3 or 3/4 of the way through my outline. Am I going to be able to make it to 50k if I've already nearly finished my way through the story?

Also, my beginning chapters (though I haven't actually divided into chapters yet, simply chunks of writing) are in dire need of assistance. One of the main rules of NaNoWriMo is to keep plodding along, and write as much as possible, without taking the time to go back and re-read, re-write or edit along the way. It's killing me that I haven't had the chance to go back and fix some of the horrible mistakes I made in the first 3-5,000 words I wrote on this project.

Here's my plan: Since I'm so far ahead at the moment (over half-way through my word count at only one quarter through the allotted time) I'm going to continue rolling through until I reach the end of my outline. If, at that time, I'm within a couple thousand words of my 50,000 word goal (not likely) I'm going to add an epilogue and call it a completed "Draft Zero." If I'm still several thousand words shy, the plan is to go back and re-work my beginning, adding more plot early on and more backstory for my main characters. Hopefully that will bring me to my goal.

The other fun thing about this month is the unbridled creativity that flows through all of the NaNoWriMo participants. I've already started to take notes on what my next novel in this series is going to be. I have my next main character, my next villain, and my next subplot. Hopefully I'm not biting off more than I can chew with this, but I believe that I'll be able to churn out another novel (Draft Zero, at any rate) in January. And by then I may be ready to go back and start re-writes and edits on my current NaNoWriMo project.

Lofty Goals. We'll see how they go.
Missy

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