NaNo Waits For No Man

Trinity here! I'm going to ramble today. Bear with me.

Get it!? BEAR with me? .... Oh, never mind. Ya'll are hopeless.

November marches on, fellow wrimos, and today is the end of the first week. Apparently, the second week is the hardest for us. It's the one where the doldrums hit us and we get discouraged. 

I have to say, I'm starting to feel it. I've heard of that little inner critic that starts saying that all your writing is horrible, and why are you even writing at all? I'd never heard from him before, but he appeared last night and I started to despair. My dialogue tags were all monotonous. My descriptions of action were drawn out and boring. Everything was moving too slowly. It didn't have any emotional depth to connect with the readers. My strong silent characters were too sappy and talkative.

Also, it was rapidly approaching midnight on the third day of staying up late to cram words in.

But. I will continue on. I don't think it's as bad as I thought it was last night, but I don't think it's as good as I originally believed it to be. My decision may change as the night wears on. Last night I managed to finish before midnight, so I'm happy about that.

Week three, though, is supposed to be a little better than week two. Like the Hump Week. (Hump daaaaaay!) The light at the end of the tunnel week. Right now my stats are predicting that I'll be done on November 27th, which would be nice, because then I could be done in time for Thanksgiving, and if I'm not mistaken, that's the day after you can officially start winning. But that's only if I keep up my pace of about 1,903 words a day. 

I don't know how many of you know, but I'm doing all my writing in a notebook so I can carry it with me everywhere I go and still get writing done. But then I have to type it all up to get an accurate word count.

I got tired of spending my whole morning, and sometime a good chunk of my afternoon typing everything up that I wrote the day before, so I came up with a clever solution. I numbered all the pages that I've filled in my notebook, then divided my word count by the number of pages to get the average number of words on each page, which is 138. Now I can just estimate how many words I have by how many pages I've filled. I think I'll have to get everything on the computer before the end of the month so I can validate it all (and win?), but for now I'm gonna stick with this.

I try to fill eight sheets (which is sixteen pages) every day, which gives me about 2,208 words per day. I estimated that, and then typed it all up and my accurate word count was 2,264, which is close enough for me. 

But anyway. My word count now is at 13,322. So, I'm moving right along. I got to my first action scene yesterday, which needs a little cleaning up. I'll probably do a little editing when I type it up because it really didn't portray Rienna accurately at all. She just kind of collapses into depression after an awful thing happens, when she's still needed. In "reality" she would just absorb the blow and keep moving on, and not bother with her more intricate, delicate emotions until she had some time to herself. 

Yeah. I'll need to fix that.

So. Keep going! And for those of you who are not NaNo-ing, I apologize, but this is what's going on right now, so that's what I'm writing about. We'll return to our regularly randomized posts in December. 

And now I need to go. I'm stalling. Procrastinating. Which gets ya'll posts, I suppose. I didn't take that into account when I was trying to guess how things would go in November. Technically it's still writing. But not really. I'm just not trying to convince myself it counts. 

Sé onr sverdar sitja hvass!
-Trinity

P.S. Check out Malinda Lo's pep talk! I don't usually think much of the pep talks, but I liked this one.

Malinda Lo's Pep Talk for Writers