Sometime around 10:45 last night, the NaNoWriMo novel died after a relapse of plot problems and increasing indifference. The relapse began on Wednesday when I realized that, despite finishing Part 2, it was more or less unusable. It wasn’t the direction I wanted to take things. At the time, I didn’t see this as critical.…
I didn’t do any writing on the novel yesterday. I worked on the outline some, fleshing out the details of Part 3, but no writing. In part this was because I was busy with too many other things. But that is just an excuse. The truth is that I am pretty unhappy with Part 3…
Now that I have completed the 30-day NaNoWriMo challenge, here is a look at what I did “by the numbers”. If you ask me, it’s pretty impressive: 61,131 words in 30 days. That’s an average of 2,037 words/day Wrote on 25 out of 30 days. If you count just those 25 days, I wrote an…
Once again, I didn’t get up early to write this morning and wrote at lunch instead. It is a frighteningly interesting phenomenon where I can be under an arbitrary deadline like NaNoWriMo and get up early every day and write 2,000 words, but when I am on my own arbitrary deadline, it doesn’t seem to…
I finally got around to posting my novel progress for the day. I ended taking the weekend off because we had friends in town and between hanging out with them and dealing with 3 little kids, I was pretty much worn out for most of the weekend. But I was back at it today, working…
I was up at 7am this morning and did the first of 2 writing sessions today. There were two scenes in Chapter 25 and I felt like between scenes was a good break point, especially since I had other chores to do this morning before our weekend guests arrived. Actually, there were not originally 2…
After a few days off, I was back to work early this afternoon. I’ve been struggling lately with the “middle muddle” and felt stuck in the mud in the midst of Part 2 of the novel, but thanks to some reworking of my outline, and some quality thinking time cleaning 4 bathrooms and vacuuming all…
You can verify your win today on the NaNoWriMo website. I just ran my verification and was validated as a winner for 2010: Now that I’ve verified my win, I’m about to tackle my 2,000 words for today. Remember: I’m aiming for 90,000 words by December 15 so I still have quite a way to…
I didn’t manage to do any writing on Monday or Tuesday because I was in New York attending various writer events. That is really just an excuse, of course. In reality it was a combination of the fact that I “won” the competition which takes off some of the pressure (I wish it didn’t), laziness…
This morning was the first morning that I did not make my personal quota of 2,000 words, and it is probably no coincidence that it happened the day after I “won” the event. Some of the pressure is off. I finished up the morning with 1,875 words, still well above the NaNoWriMo pace, for a…
With less than a thousand word to go to “win” the NaNoWriMo event, I figured I’d throw in an afternoon session to push myself past the milestone. I wrote one new scene that added 1,109 words–which gives me a 20-day total of 50,159 words, and which officially pushes me over the 50,000 word-mark. For the…
I managed a rather unexpected 2,508 words this morning in a mere 90 minutes, which surprised me, but which I think is due in part to a mid-course correction I made yesterday, which I will discuss in due course below. This morning’s session brought me to a 20-day total of 49,050 words. When I wrapped…