Normal service resumed: NaNoWriMo musings and a new challenge

 

NaNoWriMo

It is the first day in December.  After four weeks of glee and guilt in equal measure, NaNoWriMo is over.  I no longer have to worry about my word count, or how many days I have left, or how shockingly behind I am.

I haven’t “won” NaNo this year – I only managed to get to 30,000 words – so you might think that I would be dispirited and put off from writing anything else for at least six months.  Yet here I am typing this, dragging my laptop to and from work on the train, on 1^st December.

The challenge of NaNo is to write at least 50,000 words.  What I realised about half way through the month, when I was still only a little behind in my word score, is that I didn’t want to write 1,667 words a day.  Maybe I can get to that incredibly productive place, in time, once I’ve had some practise and built myself up to it.  But I’ve never written on a daily basis before, I wasn’t producing good writing and I couldn’t keep up with the pace needed.  I’m also a terrible over-editor: I can’t send a text without reading it over twice and checking that it can’t be interpreted in the wrong way or that I haven’t left out an apostrophe.

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NaNoWriMo: Update

So, we’re halfway through November.  Am I halfway through my 50,000 word writing challenge, I hear you ask?  Short answer: no.  I’m not.

I’ve managed to get to 13,083 words.  Now that’s more than a quarter of the way through, so I’m pretty pleased with that, but I’ve got a long way to go.

Last week I had a little moan about not having any motivation and was worrying about my problems with unrealistic-sounding speech.  This week, my characters are a lot less polite, which is a relief, but I’m having serious problems with self-discipline.  I’ve had a week off work, and while you’d think that would give me plenty of time to have a few marathon writing sessions, turns out I wanted to enjoy myself and have a holiday!  Especially as the weather was nice-ish last week.  Oh well, back to work tomorrow, which will mean that I have less free time, and should therefore mean that I find more time to write!  Funny how that happens.

I’m still hoping to complete NaNoWriMo, but I’ll need to churn out more than 2,000 words a day to stand a chance.  Difficult, but not impossible.  I considered not bothering to carry on, seeing as I was so pathetically low on my word count, but a number of Twitter users have inspired me by being equally far behind.

Right, back to getting Chip the hell out of Australia…

NaNoWriMo: First-timer’s first impressions and confessions

For those of you who don’t yet know, I’ve signed up to NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month.  My goal is to write 50,000 words between 1st November and 30th November, which works out at about 1,667 words a day.

My future bestselling novel is narrated by Chip, a very English Jack Russell terrier.  (At least, at the moment he’s called Chip.)  He reminisces about the time he fell down a molehill and ended up in Australia.  To get back home he couldn’t simply jump back down the tunnel (Australia is, after all, on the other side of the world, and it happened to be underneath England at that time of year), but luckily his homing instinct kicks in and we follow his journey back home to England, where he meets many furry friends along the way.