Figured I’d better check in. I crossed the 40,000 word point today, which is pretty much right on schedule if I’m aiming for 60,000 words. Honestly though, I can’t wait for this to be over.

No, this isn’t one of my whiny NaNo posts, though goodness knows there’ve been enough of those this year. This is my wanting it be over for all the right reasons.

The book this year sucks. And yes, I know all the platitudes along the lines of “The first draft of everything is shit.” (As Hemingway said.) But I’m working on the first draft of nothing. I have no passion or interest in the story I’m telling, as is. I think there’re the germs of two or three ideas buried in it and maybe some day I’ll pull them out and play with them individually. But what I’m writing is a train wreck and I’m 2/3rds of the way through. If it was going to get better it would’ve started by now.

I’m eager for NaNo to be over because I’m eager to set this aside and start something new. That I have this desire to write something else, something better, means that in a very real sense I’ve already “won” NaNoWriMo. I’ve rekindled the passion. I can’t wait for the next thing I’m going to write, even though I have no idea what it’ll be. It’ll be better than this, though, because I’ll spend some time planning it.

Very early on in this book I realized I needed to square away the backstory and do some worldbuilding if the tale I was telling was going to remain coherent, but I didn’t have time to do that, so I just started throwing words at the page. It’s the same way I worked things last year, but last year’s story was much simpler. So I learned something this year, and that’s a feather in my cap, too.

I can’t wait for NaNo to be over, so I can get started writing.