Midmonth Recap

Roight.... Not exactly updating as frequently as I had hoped. As it turns out, meeting my daily word count quotas involves staring at text on an LCD long enough that, by the day's end, my eyes are trying to roll out of my skull in protest, so the easiest thing to cut back on is the writing that has no deadline: this!

After two weeks, though, it is worth putting in an update. As of last night, my word count stood at 23,589, according to Word 2000. Recalling the quotas I set for myself at the off (1,750 per weekday, 2,625 per day on the weekends), you may note that I'm behind by some 4,500 words. Believe me, I know, and I'm working on it.

I have not had a smooth run at all reaching this point. Oddly enough, the weekends are proving most difficult. With the benefit of hindsight, I see that setting the higher quota on the weekends has just made the goal seem more daunting than it actually is. I've yet to hit the 2,625 quota once, and two out of three days of my last weekend, I did not write at all, hence the massive word deficit, that actually peeked just shy of 6,000 words.

Up until yesterday, I had been slowly chewing through that number, getting it all the way down to 4,100 words, with a plan to be zero words behind my goal by November 21. An eight-hour turnaround for work (only three of which were spent sleeping) led to some poor decisions eating up my writing time yesterday, and instead of taking another 400 words out of my deficit, I added 300 to it. I'm still bound and determined to be caught up by the twenty-first, but the quotas to do so are mounting. I'll be spending several hours cranking out 3,025 today and next Saturday, and throughout the week, I'll have to write between 2,400 and 2,500 words per day.

If I get that done, I think I'll be over the hump, though. At that point, I will have cracked the 40,000 mark, and I will be able to return to my normal quotas, which are starting to appear paltry by comparison to what I'm making myself do now. If I stay on the ball, it will be an easy stroll to the 50,000 word mark, the day before Thanksgiving. After that, I plan to spend an all-nighter writing on Black Friday, which past experience suggests should provide me with around 7,000 words. That would then put my 60,000 word goal within easy reach for the next day or two worth of writing.

Ah, but what about the novel itself? I have a nasty history of running out of outline, before reaching the word or page count goals, when writing lengthy works of fiction. At the start of Nanowrimo, my principle concern was that I would reach the story's climax around the 25,000th word be finishing up right around the 40,000 word mark, which would be disaster. I can say, right now, that is far from happening. At 23,500 words, I haven't even finished the first act, leading me to believe that even after I crack my 60,000 word goal and claim victory near the end of November, I will continue writing, well into December, just to finish up the plot.

I have so much material right now because I'm not sticking as rigidly to the outline as I usually do. At first, I found it a little difficult to let myself off the rails, since I'm just not in the habit of doing so, but there is a certain ease that I am now finding in just following the natural progress of some events. Rather than using brute force to stick with the events I had planned out, the plot is evolving more fluidly, with me gently guiding things back onto course, after indulging in the detours. Sometimes this is beneficial, as it avoids a scenario, where a character will act entirely unnaturally, just to get back to the plot. Other times, this has generated entirely pointless scenes, that I foresee being edited out, once the first draft is complete.

Another pleasant surprise is that after years of neglect, my inner-editor has been entirely demoralized and is proving easy to keep under control. If I had been writing this novel, many moons ago, instead of today, I would probably be even further behind than I am now, simply for the fact that I'd spend as much time deleting and rewriting scenes as I would generating new material. As someone who rarely wrote multiple drafts of anything in school, I am finding it surprisingly easy to remind myself that what I am writing now is a first draft that will be utter garbage, until I edit it, later.

Now, I've put enough words into this, so I'm going to get back to my novel. Hopefully, the next time I update, I will be caught up with my cumulative quota, with victory in sight!