Week Two - how was it for you?
It's been another good one. I've managed to completely resist the lure of television and mostly resist Facebook, although I'm going to spend tomorrow afternoon ruining my eyes catching up on my shows. I need to know what's happened in Homeland and The Big Bang Theory.
Word count at the end of Week Two:
19,586, as of half-seven in the evening on Friday the 15th. I'm a little behind but I'm not too worried.
Are you diligently keeping to a certain word count per day, or are you writing in longer sessions?
It's fluctuating a little. On Wednesday I only managed a little over 1,100 but Tuesday produced 2,300 so things are balancing out quite well. I've got an almost free weekend ahead of me so I'm hoping to get in at least one long session and create a bit of a safety buffer for myself.
Any changes to your writing schedule/habits?
I'm a really boring person these days and I like my routines so there's been no change. I am having to consult my dictionary a little more often than I'm used to – for some reason the newest version of Open Office I downloaded a week or two ago has no dictionary for the spell-check and I'm nowhere near computer literate enough to know how to fix it. Thankfully my spelling isn't too bad, and using spell-check is kind of lazy so it isn't too much of a hassle.
How’s Maria? In your post for Week One you said you were on track to stick to the novel outline you crafted in the lead-up to November. Has anything come up that’s knocked that off track?
The exact order of events has shifted a little but nothing drastic – there haven't been any new characters or subplots the story has to include, and I haven't discovered any gaping holes. Most of the changes have been to the pacing of the story. It was moving a little too slowly last week and was getting a little too much like The O.C. or some other hideous teen drama. That's been taken care of, I hope, and I'm starting to get into the story properly now. I do think I'm going to make some more drastic changes towards the end, based on how things are developing, but forewarned is forearmed and all that.
Do any particular writing challenges present themselves this week?
The biggest challenge is a purely physical one. The new job involves a lot of data input, and it has to be done fast to avoid annoying the people on the other end of the phone. That combined with the fact that I'm a little heavy handed when I type is really making my hands hurt so I'm having to be very good about sitting at the keyboard properly – another bad habit it's probably good I'm being forced to get myself out of. With regards to the actual story the big challenge is getting the tone and balance right. Maria is starting to reveal the things that have happened in her past and her present is about to get really rather horrid as well. There's a lot of very grim things going on and whilst I have no intention or desire to sugar-coat them I also don't want to find myself writing about them in a way that is overly sensational or too explicit. It is a little tricky for someone used to reveling in the gory details but I think I'm getting it right. I quite like what I've done so far at any rate, and that's normally a good sign.
Hopes for next week:
I'm hoping to up the daily word count to somewhere around 2,500 - 3,000 a day. This isn't just because I want to brag about hitting the target early – I think Maria going to end up somewhere around the seventy thousand mark and I want to complete it all in the month. Which I will definitely be bragging about if I do. Otherwise I want to get a good distance into the disintegration of Maria's life and mind. There are a couple of really big set-pieces coming up and I'd like to have at least two of them dealt with by Thursday at the latest. I also want to start revealing more about Graham. He's a little two-dimensional at the moment and I don't want to leave him as some kind of cartoon villain.
NaNo in a nutshell (Week Two):
This is still the best NaNo I've done – the timeline and plot outline are really helping me to stay focused. My fingers may be sore and I've barely seen my friends and family for fifteen days but I am having the most amount of fun I've had in quite awhile. I'll just have to cross my achy fingers that I'm producing something worth reading!
For more on NaNoWriMo and to follow our other writers, please take a look here.
Thanks for the sympathy. The hands are a lot better this week - I've got a proper desk at work now so my arms are properly supported. I work for a catalog company and punching all those product codes with nothing to rest my elbows on was the real problem.
I agree about not worrying, but I do it all the time regardless. What I try to do, since I just can't stop my head thinking that way, is turn it to my advantage by using it as tool. Instead of fretting about if the work is good I use the worry to make sure I don't veer too far off track. It's helped me avoid massive pitfalls in the past, like the spur of the moment subplots I write far too often and always end up forcing an entire rewrite or killing a character just because I'm a little bored or they've started to annoy me.
Christopher, don't worry too much about the tone or the pacing at this stage. These always need to be addressed in the edits anyway. You'll probably find when you look back that the tone varies dramatically, but you usually can't find the right consistent voice until you edit. Just see where the muse takes you for each scene, write it the way it feels good at the time.
Huge sympathies for the aching hands. I'm an RSI sufferer too.