NaNoWriMo, Week 1

Last Thursday was Halloween.  I went and handed out candy at my mother’s house, then came home and watched TV with Hubs like the thirty-something’s we are.  On Friday morning I awoke at 5am, unable to sleep due to bad dreams, which have been plaguing me lately.  I’ve been very stressed out so I’m sure this is the reason, but alas, I haven’t been sleeping well.  So 530am found me at my computer, retyping half of the first chapter of my novel.  I could easily have finished it, but I was pacing myself.  1667 word a day is rough.  I didn’t want to get too crazy.  On Saturday morning I finished the chapter and felt very proud of myself.  Only like 14 more to go.

Day three was a little trickier.  There was much research of the Eastern Meadowlark, as well as me trying to peck out a couple hundred extra words when I came up short.  I wasn’t discouraged though, and sat there typing away while my husband watched the football game.  Every once in a while, my click-clacking was interrupted by a holler from the other room.  I could tell the Bills were winning.

Monday found me on my sofa not wanting to move.  I had to update the blog as well as do NaNo, and I am running out of blog posts.  All my writing thoughts have been about the WIP (work in progress, for future reference,) and I have thus been neglecting my blog.  I mean it’s easy right now to do NaNo updates on Thursdays, but Mondays are looking pretty bare.

Anyway, I wasn’t feeling it, and then Hubs send me a text saying “break a leg on your writing today. You got this.”  That got me off my ass and into the office, where I finished up a blog post and got it out, then did 1500 words on the WIP.  A little encouragement goes a long way.  I told him so, and therefore on Tuesday I woke up to “never give up on your dreams, you’re an awesome writer.”

I went to the office and did 1800 words, then 2000 words of a short story that was taking up space in my field of vision and needed to disappear.  I felt that if I could get it out of me quickly then I could continue focusing on my WIP, which was getting away from me because of a stupid ghost story idea.

Yesterday I dropped another 1700 words which took me over 10k total.  I did another 2000 in the afternoon, and today I did 2400, bringing my total up to 14,768.

Pretty good start for a week.

Of course, everything I have done so far has been meticulously planned and many scenes were already written in bits and pieces.  In a few days, I will be writing without a net, so to speak; I have less material and notes for the middle and end of the book.  I know where I want to go, but we shall see what path I take to get there.

In a few days, my friend Sahar will be in town, and we are planning an epic 24-hour write-in.  I am both excited to be working alongside my friend and terrified that she will be typing away while I stare at the ceiling trying to peck out 100 words.  This is a stupid fear of course, and I will do everything in my power to ignore it, but it’s symbolic of how I feel without having so much material to work from.  Still…I got this far.  I wrote this much.  I can do this, right?

And so, week 1 comes to a close, and we move on to week 2.  I am on the end of Chapter 4 currently, and am excited to see where I will be in another week, even if I am terrified that I will run out of words.  To my fellow NaNo buddies, keep plugging away!  I promise to do the same.

Advertisement

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s