Another NaNo update...and Mum has flown away again
NaNoWriMo continues to go surprisingly well for me. Yay!
Papercuts should go over 30k words today, which is way ahead of where I thought I'd be. If anyone is doing the maths, that's a long way ahead of the NaNo goals, too. It's not quite the midway point, and I'm more than halfway to 50k already.
Which is good, because my goal is to have a complete first draft by the end of the year, and 50k would not make a complete novel at today's book lengths. The trick will be keeping the momentum up in December, when there are dozens of temptations and other things out that to distract me (such as Yuletide, eep!).
I haven't hit the mid-novel "this sucks, I'm never going to make it good" point yet, although I did hit a "argh, what happens next?" moment last night. I think that I've figured that out, though, and hopefully I won't be hitting too many of those :-D
(I keep reminding myself that even if the middle is a bit of a muddle in the first draft, revisions can fix that. It's a very important mantra. If I can stick the landing, I can go back and rejig a few bits to make the run-up to the landing make more sense.)
I've now got all the important characters and plot threads established. My main character still feels like the right choice, and the secondary characters that have popped up unexpectedly are fun to write. I was slightly concerned that my MC was too perfect, but she's fleshing out as I write, and I'm getting a good feel for her flaws and imperfections now.
Also, I got my first dead body on the page. It's probably a weird thing that I always feel more confident about a story when the death and mayhem start kicking in, but I do. That probably says something terrible about my psyche.
(The body isn't technically on the page. It's elsewhere, off-screen, but people know about it and are worrying, which is the important part for the plot.)
So, yeah, NaNoWriMo is going shockingly well and eating my brain, but it's leaving me with very little time for other types of writing. Oh well, that's the way it has to be for now :-D
In other news...
Mum returned to England last night. I'm both relieved to have my house back to myself, and oddly hollow because I'd got used to her company. I'm not usually this conflicted about her leaving. Maybe that's because this was a bit of a weird year during her visit? I was working a hell of a lot, tons of overtime, and Mum helped me to stay sane through some of the worst of it. That part of the project is over, so I don't need all the help anymore, but it meant that I never reached the "argh! get my mother out of my hair!" stage that I usually get to. Huh.
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Papercuts should go over 30k words today, which is way ahead of where I thought I'd be. If anyone is doing the maths, that's a long way ahead of the NaNo goals, too. It's not quite the midway point, and I'm more than halfway to 50k already.
Which is good, because my goal is to have a complete first draft by the end of the year, and 50k would not make a complete novel at today's book lengths. The trick will be keeping the momentum up in December, when there are dozens of temptations and other things out that to distract me (such as Yuletide, eep!).
I haven't hit the mid-novel "this sucks, I'm never going to make it good" point yet, although I did hit a "argh, what happens next?" moment last night. I think that I've figured that out, though, and hopefully I won't be hitting too many of those :-D
(I keep reminding myself that even if the middle is a bit of a muddle in the first draft, revisions can fix that. It's a very important mantra. If I can stick the landing, I can go back and rejig a few bits to make the run-up to the landing make more sense.)
I've now got all the important characters and plot threads established. My main character still feels like the right choice, and the secondary characters that have popped up unexpectedly are fun to write. I was slightly concerned that my MC was too perfect, but she's fleshing out as I write, and I'm getting a good feel for her flaws and imperfections now.
Also, I got my first dead body on the page. It's probably a weird thing that I always feel more confident about a story when the death and mayhem start kicking in, but I do. That probably says something terrible about my psyche.
(The body isn't technically on the page. It's elsewhere, off-screen, but people know about it and are worrying, which is the important part for the plot.)
So, yeah, NaNoWriMo is going shockingly well and eating my brain, but it's leaving me with very little time for other types of writing. Oh well, that's the way it has to be for now :-D
In other news...
Mum returned to England last night. I'm both relieved to have my house back to myself, and oddly hollow because I'd got used to her company. I'm not usually this conflicted about her leaving. Maybe that's because this was a bit of a weird year during her visit? I was working a hell of a lot, tons of overtime, and Mum helped me to stay sane through some of the worst of it. That part of the project is over, so I don't need all the help anymore, but it meant that I never reached the "argh! get my mother out of my hair!" stage that I usually get to. Huh.
This entry was originally posted at http://selenay.dreamwidth.org/514084.html. There are currently
babbles on the entry on Dreamwidth. Leave comments at http://selenay.dreamwidth.org/514084.html?mode=reply