Week three. Week three? Seriously. How can NaNoWriMo already be halfway over? I don't know about anyone else who's participating, but it feels to me as though this month only just started. At this rate, this month will be over in no time flat. They say that time flies when you're having fun, and although that's certain true when it comes to NaNoWriMo I think that scrambling to write more than 1,667 words every day is making it go by even quicker. At this point I haven't been able to reach par since day nine, but I'm still comfortably within the realm of "I can win this!"
Anyway, last week was all about falling behind. Hopefully this week will be about catching up. I'm not going to lie, I'm surprised how well my story is coming along so far. That's not to say that it's a great story or that my writing is polished (far from it, in fact), only that I've managed to stay on track much better than last year. In 2015, I focused too much on rereading everything I wrote and meticulously editing every sentence on every page. The descriptions may have sounded all right, but in the end I only wrote around 15,000 words--that's less than one third of the way to the 50,000-word goal. There were a few other factors that contributed to my low word count, but I believe that my impulse to edit everything I wrote is what ultimately sabotaged my progress. This year I've reduced my habit to rereading a few paragraphs or so of my writing only to refresh my memory of a scene, storyline, or a character's speech patterns. This tactic has proven to work much better than last year's and my story has moved along much quicker. I've even made progress with the story's main conflict, introducing information integral to the plot and getting closer to the challenge my protagonist will soon face. I'm so close to writing the scene of my story that's been in my head for over a year now, the scene my entire manuscript is based on, that I'm tempted to skip ahead and write it now. I'm holding off on writing it for now, however. I usually save skipping ahead to write later scenes when I'm stuck on one part of the story and need to keep my momentum going. But for once, I'm not stuck, so I'm saving the scene for when I naturally get to it in the story. Still, being so close to writing the scene that has floated around in my imagination for so long is motivating, and I'd be surprised if I didn't get to it at some point this week. And how knows? Maybe it will provide the incentive I need to boost my daily word count so I can catch up sooner rather than later. But I'm not worried: for the moment I'm having fun, and I'm still confident that I'll claim my NaNoWriMo win!
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Who Am I?Introverted bookworm, vegan foodie, casual runner, writer/editor, envier of tiny houses, Hufflepuff/Pukwudgie, and self-declared nerd. Creating Order From Chaos
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December 2016
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