Last week I talked about how my word count would have to suffer while I put the rest of my life back in order.
Well most things are now ordered, so I am pushing hard to get back on track with word count. With Turkey Day being this week, I’ll have both down time and busy time, so I should be able to keep on pace.
I am a little terrified, however, because I just got my final exam for my grammar class, and it’s due by December 3rd. And it looks HARD.
Anyways. That’s where I’m at in life and word count. Let’s talk about much more pleasant things. Like where I’m at in my story.
I just have to say, that regardless of the year, the third week of Nanowrimo always ends up being magical. My story is picking up speed. The words are easy to write. My characters are developing themselves. Unexpected plot twists emerge in each word sprint. This. The things that start to happen in Week Three are what I love about being a writer.
It just takes two weeks of hammering your head against a wall to get to this magical point.
This year, I’m not too focused on the finished product of this story, I’m more focused just on getting to 50,000 words by the end of the month. The story idea I chose had the potential be to serious and epic, but I went with fun and violent instead.
Last year, and even several years before that, I had high hopes for the stories I was writing. This year, I am able to write 4k – 6k words in a day because I’m only writing for fun. I don’t have more invested in this story. If I don’t finish it, or if it ends up having no publication potential whatsoever, I’m not worried about it. It’s purely fun and almost purely nonsense.
This year, Nanowrimo was an exercise in time management and an excuse to spend lots of hours with my writing friends. It’s also been a challenge to see how many words I can write in a day when I really put my mind to it.
Every year I do Nano, I end up with some new and different challenge for myself. One year it was to write 60k words instead of 50k. One year it was to actually finish the story by the end of the month. One year it was to balance my first year as ML with writing my story. One year it was to write a memoir instead of fiction. One year it was to write in a genre I’d never tried before. Last year was to balance a large cast of characters with several different points of view.
This year was simply to reach 50k while managing all of the time-consuming aspects of my life.
And a sub-challenge has been to discover how many words I can write in a day. Turns out I can write quite a few.
Every year I do NaNo, I learn more about myself as a writer, I become a better writer, and my writing family becomes even larger.
As tough as this month has been, November is still my favorite month of the year.
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