paper graffiti

I’m closing in on 50,000 even though I hate my story right now and want to burn it down and start from scratch. Pushing through writing a story you hate is hard but it’s a great exercise. I know how good reaching the 50,000 goal will feel when I get there, but just once I wish if have a rough draft I’m proud of at the end of NaNo. There is always next year…

Last week was an even bigger writing fail. I didn’t write from Wednesday through Saturday, thanks to a raging headache that lasted well into my weekend. It skated right along the edges of a migraine but never tipped over, keeping me feeling pretty terrible the entire time with no respite. I can’t take the migraine medicine unless there is an actual migraine happening…such torture! That pretty much ruined all my weekend plans.

I managed to shake the cobwebs off and churn out just over 2,600 words in a little over an hour last night, which brings my total word count up to 15,050. I should be around 23,000 right now, so I still have some catching up to do, but I’m not too worried. I use a NaNo calendar that automatically adjusts my daily wordcount (up OR down) based on the amount of words I write each day. I only need about 2200 words a day to make it to 50,000 by the 30th, which is pretty easy if I can carve out an hour each night. That’s the hard part, but hopefully a few of these nights will allow for some make-up writing and then I can go into Thanksgiving week ahead of the game. Days off also mean some extra writing time, which is good. I’ll be taking my iPad and bluetooth keyboard with me to all the family functions so I can write once everyone else falls asleep and I get bored.

Last week wasn’t a great one for writing…I was busy and distracted, needed to do some additional research, and I had prior commitments that made it hard to carve out time to write. On Sunday, I made the decision to ramp my total goal back down to 50,000 instead of 100,000. I’ve been consistently writing at least 2,000 words a night to get myself back on track by this weekend. I’ll keep writing after I hit the 50,000, but it’s just a lot more realistic for this month.

Here are my daily wordcounts so far:

Day 1: 1677

Day 2: 1731

Day 3: 876

Day 4: 415

Day 5: 1442

Day 6: 0

Day 7: 2125

Day 8: 2150

Day 9: 2014

I went back and read my 2008 NaNo project last night, which may have been a mistake…because now I’m super excited about going back and finishing it. At the end of November 2008, I thought what I had written was a pile of crap, but I was proud of at least finishing the goal I had set. I never intended to go back and work on it at all, or even read it. Imagine my surprise when I pulled it out last night and found ten chapters of a fast-paced, fun novel with a pretty solid premise. It definitely needs some work, and obviously an ending, but I felt pretty great after I finished reading through it.

Maybe I can be a “real” writer after all, if I just stop second guessing myself.