Another light night

Did a lot of chores on the way home from work, so got a late start. And I still have some things to do around the house; basically I’m trying to get the weekend free for one last big push.

Still, I broke the 40K barrier. And, amazingly, I think I have just enough story left to carry my through to 50K.

I’m really going to do this, dammit. I’m fucking amazed…

Tough night.

Tonight wasn’t easy. First of all, I was exhausted when I got home so I laid down for a minute and the next thing I know it was 8 pm, so I started late. And I had a lot of distractions on my mind. Some pleasant, and some not. A friend of mine is having a tough time in her relationship right now and I’m a bit worried about her.

So the words came slowly. And then suddenly I was writing a relationship between two of my characters and finally the floodgates opened.

Which makes me wonder if it’d be possible to outline a book, identify the scenes I needed, and then choose a scene to work on based on my mood or what’s on my mind?

A matter of habit

I had a lot of things I wanted to do tonight, and figured I wouldn’t get much writing done. Still I sat down now and then, out of force of habit. The laptop say there beckoning to me.

And I ended up getting some words down. Sweet.

Hitting 50K is going to be trickier than I thought, though. When the story was ‘broken’ it was broken because there was no way I could fit that story into 5oK. But the fixed story is rushing towards ‘The End’ a bit too rapidly. I don’t want to hit the end before I hit 50k!!

These are pretty artificial problems, of course. NaNo problems. I’ll work it out. There’s no sex in the story yet. I could layer in 10k words of pr0n easily!!! 🙂

Plot doctoring

After the weekend I’d found I’d written myself into a corner. So tonight I spent some time plot-doctoring by throwing ideas around with a friend, then sketching out a rough outline for the rest of the novel.

So not a lot of words tonight, but I accomplished more than what is shown by the word count.

Back on track

After a few days of stumbling, I feel like my NaNovel is back on track. Today I wrote more than I have in any other single day so far. And my characters are doing things, and growing a bit. The world is starting to coalesce. Its feeling good again.

I couldn’t do this without the support of friends and strangers. Thank you all!

Still running on fumes

So another night when the words just refused to come. Every little thing was distracting me, then I’d sit down and just stare at the screen. Write a few words and drift off again.

I’ve decided that 8 hour meetings are not conducive to my writing. But the weekend is almost here and hopefully I’ll be able to put my nose to the grindstone and catch up.

I wanted to thank you folks who left such encouraging comments on my last post, by the way. I don’t think I would’ve even *tried* to write tonight if it hadn’t been for you.

Evil is fun!!

Tonight I got to invent an evil race. 🙂

You see, my novel is schlock fantasy. It has humans and elves and…when it came time to have a race of bad guys, I wanted to stay away from the tried and true orcs or goblins or what have you.

So far the race doesn’t have a name, but my characters refer to them as “Bead People” for reasons I shall leave unspoken for now.

My plot is finally starting to take off, although I fear the story will grow larger than 50,000 words can contain.

This feels really, really good.

Tip: I stopped listening to MP3’s and started tuning into Internet Radio, in my case Live365. With a continuous, virtually ad-free stream of ambiant music, its easy to just lose yourself in the words.

Lessons being learned

I wrote a good deal today, but I may do a bit more later so I’m not updating the word count yet.

This process, so far, has been almost entirely positive. I’m learning a lot about myself as a writer. For instance, I think I’m an outliner. Flying by the seat of my pants is proving difficult. It’s like I’m running a race but I don’t know where the finish line is, so I don’t know if I’m getting close or not.

I’m already looking forward to the end of NaNo because I’m going to try again, giving myself the time it takes to write a ‘real’ novel. I find myself, now, wishing I had more background on the world, wishing I had time to draw a map, or what have you. But I know that this is NaNo, and I need to keep forging ahead.

I’ve been downright reclusive this week, but that feels ok too.

And it isn’t like I don’t have help, because I do!.

(Actually, my friends have been incredibly supportive so far. Thank you all!)