No, get kidnapped.
No I (sadly) didn't get abducted by mercurial aliens from beyond the fifth dimension.
I knew when I started this blog that it was gonna be a challenge to update it every day. It's been a but more of a challenge than I thought. During the first week of so of NaNoWriMo, I'd finish my wordcount by something like 10pm, and be able to pop in and tell you how everything went.
During week two, it pushed later, and the updates became more sparingly spaced. things got harder. The story looked at my outline and said "to hell with you, I'll do what I want".
Week three has been the story rebelling against the author, so to speak. Characters decide to do things I hadn't intended, people who I thought were a dirty shade of white became steel gray. Characters who were initially supposed to dominate the story are now sitting on deaths door step, having been pulled back before they could walk through.
They always say that the second week in the hardest, but I disagree, I think the third week is the hardest. I find myself still plunking the keys during Jon Stewart, which I haven't had to do up unto this point. I'm ahead of my wordcount, but I want to stay there. I want to be able to finish early and take a day off on my birthday (since I'm not doing anything else on it, just taking a day off of NaNo would be nice).
I have that chance this coming week with Thursday and Friday available for me to to do double sessions or sessions and a half. Plunk down a thousand words in the morning, then another thousand and a half at night. Saturday I could do this too... that's a potential 7500 words in 3 days. Dump that on top of my current 33405 (probably closer to 37000 by the time thursday hits) and I'm within 5k of my goal. I dump another one of those on Sunday and I've got almost 47k by the end of the weekend.
My problem is now that I've just ended the big opening sequence. I'm 80 pages in and I've just completed the first sequence and inciting incident. This piece is a god damned monster. Bigger than I intended. I'm not even out of Act I yet. If this were an Indiana Jones movie, Marcus would have just now told him about the Ark of the Covenant.
So much to go, and I just kind of want a day to step back and reassess. I need a game plan because I'm swiftly running out of outline, and what I do have doesn't quite fit anymore.
Current word count: 33,405
Days left: 10
Hemingway had the right idea.
When I did my NaNo project for last year, had finished with the 50,000 and then some. It was only Act I. There is a lot of world building that takes place in the first act that takes up a lot of room.
ReplyDeleteYou'll get through it, draft zero is almost over
Draft Zero isn't almost over.
ReplyDeleteIt's not even through Act 1