NaNo Days 18 to 27: From lagger to winner

I did it! 50,000 NaNo words are done! I am an official NaNoWriMo 2020 winner!

If my last blogpost was the last thing you heard about my NaNo'ing, you're probably not surprised, but the final week really was a lot harder than it should have been. I'll leave my daily word count graph here to illustrate:

See that massive drop after day 21? That's what we call writer's fatigue. Not writer's block, I had a firm idea of where this story was going, but I was just tired of writing it all down. This crash coincided with me coming home from the November trip I take each year and plunging into a big pile of work stuff and home stuff and social stuff that was waiting for me. My brain just couldn't be bothered to also add NaNo'ing to the list. So after a day (23) of not writing anything at all, I pulled myself together and decided on at least 1,000 words a day. The bare minimum, which some days took me an hour and a half. But I stuck in there, and still managed to finish three days ahead of par.

Now my story is far from finished. That may actually be one of the issues; I'd actually plotted out the story this year, using my fancy whiteboard and magnets and everything. The whole book consists of twelve chapters in total, but since each chapter was going to be around 8,000 to 10,000 words, I would probably only make it halfway through. Which would be fine, of course, the goal here is to write 50,000 words, not to write an entire novel. But all the little bits and pieces I'd already written down in flashes of inspiration only went into those first six chapters. Those were the ones I'd thought out in detail; the rest are still rough sketches. And around day 23, I was at the end of chapter six. Not that all chapters were completely finished, there are some bits where I put what needed to be written between brackets [like so] and then went off and wrote the next bit that came after. So I came to my endpoint a bit quicker than expected; 5,000 words quicker, to be exact. And writing a whole new piece, a bit you haven't actually thought that much about, a bit you thought you might not write until maybe November 2021, that is hard going. I got there, in the end, but I'm pretty sure the last 5,000 words wouldn't make the cut in an editing round.

Doesn't matter; I finished. And I still like most of my story. I like my characters, I like my story arch, I like where everything is going. Some bits I was truly inspired, writing as fast as I could to get all the ideas and sentences that were flowing from my head on the paper. Of course, there are some bits I don't like, but the overall feeling is pretty positive. But I am done with it now; I won't be doing any more writing for the rest of this year (except for blog posts of course!). A couple of weeks ago I thought the positive writing vibe would carry me onwards, but I know see that I need some time to recuperate and start collecting those little inspirational snippets again, to one day braid into the story again. So we'll see again next year!

NaNo Days 10 to 17: (way) more than halfway

 I'm still writing! That I'm not writing about the writing doesn't mean the writing itself is not taking place! If that makes any sense at all.
But yes; the NaNo writing is still happening. I just finished for today at 34,521 words, which is more than 6,000 words over the par of Day 17. My daily writing average is a little over 2,000 words, which is probably one of the highest I've had since I've done NaNoWriMo and had a job.

Daily word counts up to day 17.

Story wise, I've managed to get a better grip on my main character and while planning the next couple of chapters actually discovered a repetitive pattern that I hadn't planned on being there, but which now turns out to have quietly emerged. This is nice, because I have no idea what will happen in the latter half of the story; I have only the first six chapters planned out. Those will  probably get me to 50,000 words, but at that point the story isn't over yet. The real discovery will be what will happen after that; will I continue writing to finish it, or will I be content with my 50,000 words and leave the whole thing unfinished as it is? Only time will tell...

NaNo Days 6 to 9: I am a palindrome!

So my last NaNo update was pretty brief and I could repeat most of what I said there in this post, since not much has changed. It is the usual roller coaster ups and downs of the work week, with the added bonus of actually doing stuff in the weekends. So usually I write around 4,000 to 5,000 words on Saturday or Sunday, but now they're more or less the same as the work week pattern. I think it would work, as a Roller Coaster Tycoon concoction:

Daily word count for days 1 to 9.

I did manage to write at least 1,000 words each day, so that's good.

And my total word count as of this moment is 18,181, a palindrome worthy of the NaNo palindrome club. When I reached this point yesterday evening I was debating whether to keep on writing or stop for the night, but such a nice number deserves to be the end point for at least 12 hours. I'll add more words this afternoon, hopefully getting up to 20,000 words today.

Story wise everything is going as expected; the main character thinks and does as she pleases, several side characters have developed personalities far removed from what I'd actually anticipated and several major plot points have moved up or down the story as a consequence of the above. This is okay; I am not forcing the writing into the ideas I've plotted out, but I'm letting the story flow naturally. Hopefully, this will get me to the finish line with an end product I actually like!

NaNo Days 2 to 5: 10k in the pocket

Just a short update this time, to let you know I'm still actually NaNo'ing. So this week was a work week. A busy work week, to be exact, with lots of meetings and presentations and tomorrow even a complete convention (all digital, of course). Not a lot of time to write, as expected. But I still managed to squeeze in at least 1,000 words every day, with two days of over 2,000 words. My total word count is now at 11,506, so I have crossed the 20% mark at 10,000. So far, so good; I'm liking my story, I'm liking my characters and I'm liking where this is going!

NaNo Day 1: the road to 5k

So today turned out to be not the rainy, grey depression that was predicted, but a nice sunny morning that gave me the opportunity to actually do some stuff in the garden. This meant I started my NaNo'ing a bit later than I'd planned, but I still made it to 4,737 words before my head turned to mush and I had to stop. Which, as always,  happened quite suddenly but also quite completely.

That I actually almost reached 5k on the first day is pretty unexpected (despite setting my goal there) as I didn't have as clear an image of what I was going to write as other years. This may sound strange since I'm working with my plotting board, but the first card simply said 'character lies in bed reminiscing about the past'. Which is what she did for the first 3,500 words, but to actually spend that many words writing about not really that much happening without it being one big chunk of exposition is not that easy. So I'm glad I pulled that off, and I was also glad when I could actually move over to the second of my main plot points for this chapter. I stopped writing in the middle of that, because I already know where it is going to go and that gives me a quicker start next time (something I learned the hard way on some earlier NaNo years; always stop in a place you still know where you're working towards).
So NaNoWriMo is off to a good start on a quiet Sunday afternoon. Let's see if this holds up on a much busier Monday!