Once again, I didn’t get up early to write this morning and wrote at lunch instead. It is a frighteningly interesting phenomenon where I can be under an arbitrary deadline like NaNoWriMo and get up early every day and write 2,000 words, but when I am on my own arbitrary deadline, it doesn’t seem to hold much weight. I think this is the discipline that full-time writers talk about when they say that it is difficult to write everyday when you don’t real deadlines hanging over your head.
But write at lunch I did. I worked on Chapter 30 which is the final chapter of Part 2. The chapter contains 3 scenes and I wrote all of the first two and the beginning of the last before having to bring myself to a stop and get back to work. It totaled 2,043 words and brings me to a 30-day total of 61,131 words for NaNoWriMo.
I’ll have more to say on my stats for this month in the next post.
What I want to say here is that Part 2 of my novel, while virtually finished, is going to be completely rewritten in the second draft. I don’t like the direction it has taken, and while there are interesting aspects to some of it, I don’t think it makes for a very exciting part of the story. I kind of saw this coming when I got bogged down in the infamous middle-muddle, but I ignored it and pressed on in order to get the writing done. What I see now are several plot problems that aren’t easily resolvable, to say nothing of trying to cram too much in without being able to focus on any of the more interest aspects of what I was trying to do. I’m not sure what direction it will take in the second draft but I expect it to be a complete rewrite, and I imagine that of the 30,000 words or so that currently make up Part 2, I’ll retain only a fraction of that. What that leaves me with is what I think of as a very good Part 1 and what I think will be a very good Part 3 and I’ll need something interesting to bridge the two parts.
That said, I think it was a good experience just forcing myself to write because it helped me to identify the problems and start to work on ways that I could attempt to fix them. And when those fixes looked like they wouldn’t hold, it helped me realize when and what will have to go in order to make this the best possible story it can be, and for me that is crucial.
A word about the next 15 days or so:
NaNoWriMo officially ends today at midnight. But for me, the process of writing my first novel continues and for the sake of consistency, I will continue my daily progress posts under the post titles of NaNoWriMo 2010 Day x. The charts that I include at the end of each post will change slightly since I can no longer make use of the NaNo website’s automatically generated charts, but the principle will be the same and those following along can continue to follow my progress through this novel as I begin on Part 3. I still have some work on the Part 3 outline and I hope to get some of that done tonight. My personal deadline is to finish up the novel by December 15–two weeks from tomorrow, but my hard deadline is actually December 20, the day before I go on vacation. I do not want the novel hanging over my head when I am trying to relax.
Be sure to check out the post that follows this one if you are interested in some of my stats for the month of November.
And as always, here are today’s numbers:
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