I had a plan to take advantage of the end of Daylight Saving time. I didn’t change the clocks last night. I planned to be up at 7am and work until 10am, and then change the clocks back to 9am, stealing for myself an extra hour of writing this morning. It didn’t quite work out that way, in part because Zach didn’t cooperate with the plan. But nevertheless, Day 7 saw my most productive writing session to date. Between 6:50 and 8:40, I managed 2,879 words bringing my 7-day total to 17,006 words. For comparison, the 7-day NaNoWriMo pace is 11,669 words. My target 7-day pace is 14,000 words. And last year, after 7 days I’d reached 15,324 words. So 17,006 words is far better than I could have imagined doing in the first seven days of the event.
For once, however, I didn’t finish a chapter. I started on Chapter 7 this morning with the intention of writing the whole thing, but it is a longer chapter than the previous ones, and made of up 3 scenes. I wrote the first scene and the last scene, but skipped over the middle scene. It is possible that I will go back nad write that scene later today, and I imagine that will add another 1,200 words or so and bring the chapter close to 4,000 words. Ultimately, I may break it into two separate chapters (there is at least one good cliff-hanger breakpoint after the first scene). But I’ll worry about shifting stuff around in the second draft. I’ve added a note about it to the scene file in Scrivener so I don’t forget.
Of the two scenes I wrote today, the second was a cannibalized version of a scene that I’d written a year ago when I tried to write this story. It’s a lovely dream-sequence scene that fits well, and which I modified to fit even better in the context in which it take place. It is a perhaps the most poetically written part of the novel so far, and it makes the first scene I wrote today–mostly an action sequence–bland in comparison. Again, I made some notes on this, but I’ll worry about evenness and consistency in the second draft.
If I can tackle the rest of Chapter 7 today, then I’ll be back up at 5am tomorrow starting on Chapter 8 which really begins to accelerate the pace of the first part the novel, driving toward what I hope is an explosive climax around chapter 15. Otherwise, I’ll try and get the rest of Chapter 7 and 8 done tomorrow morning.
I’m very happy I made it through 1 week and stuck to both my schedule and my daily goals. I’m hoping to do the same thing in the coming week. Maybe I’ll wrap up 2 weeks somewhere in excess of 35,000 words?
Here are today’s stats:
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