NaNoWriMo Week 2

NaNoWriMo 2017 Participant BadgeThis week has been rough.

The day job ended up sapping a lot of my attention and energy.  There are also a bunch of personal things going on.  It has made keeping up on word count difficult.  No problem.  I thought I would catch up on the three day weekend.

Then I started having problems writing.  The words would not flow.  Stress, I thought. The harder I pushed, the fewer words I produced.  I’ve had this problem before, and I didn’t like what caused it the last time.  I showed my outline to a friend, and she pointed out several problems with it that had flown right past me.

Great, I thought.  I’m going to have to scrap the 4,800 words already written and start over from scratch.

The good news is that they aren’t words that were ‘wasted.’  The 4,800 words won’t be put into that novella. But they have allowed me to learn some things about the characters, and I know some things that need to change or be fleshed out.  With any luck, I’ll be able to write a new outline of about 2000 words.

I’ve done about 4,500 words on other projects, bringing my total written to just over 9100 words.  I’m behind, and in theory, I could catch up.  I’d have to do around 2,300 words a day.  Yeah, it’s not going to be easy, but if I’m careful, I should be able to do it.

If not, I will recalibrate my goal.  I really want to have the first draft of this novel knocked out by the end of the month.  I don’t have a publication date for it, but the sooner I have it polished and ready to go, the better.  I know that I’ll be diving back into Chaos Wolf when I get it back at the end of November.  So I need to buckle down, put my fingers to the keyboard, and write.