It's 2:25am on June 1, and I'm currently at 6,468 words. I'll go ahead and announce that I started JuNo one hour early, so I've had 3.5 hours of writing time. I'll be stopping an hour early as well, to keep everything fair. No harm, no foul as far as I'm concerned -- the length of the challenge is the same, but staying up until the wee hours of the night is harder for me than it used to be.
I wanted to stay up later to write more (10k in one night would have been such a fantastic thing to brag about, wouldn't it?), but my caffeine is failing me and my eyes are slipping closed. I'm going to try to wake up relatively early tomorrow morning. I'm trying not to let my mother know that I'm writing, because she invariably pokes holes in my ego as soon as she finds out that I'm starting a new project. She's taking summer courses at the local community college from 8am-10am Monday through Thursday. I'm going to try to wake up in time to write during that block, when I KNOW that she'll be consistently out of the house and therefore unable to make commentary on what I'm doing. That will give me a scheduled, established time set aside as "writing time" with built-in privacy. That's the plan, anyway.
If the writing stays at this pace (it won't; I'm not that much of an idealist), I may have to change my goal from 50k to something closer to an actual full draft. I didn't expect to make NEARLY this much progress tonight. I was going to be grateful if I managed to scrape by with just making quota at 1,667. My shoutouts from here on out will probably be much less impressive than this one, but I just couldn't go to bed without telling someone about it.
June 01, 2011, at 11:54pm:
10k. TEN THOUSAND WORDS in 24 hours (and with 6 minutes to spare, too).
Mind = blown.
This is officially the second-most-productive writing day I've ever had. Most productive was the final day of NaNo in '06, when I wrote 12k between 4pm and midnight. Then there was today -- 10k in 24 hours, and totally not burnt out. I'm thinking about doing more, but I promised myself that I could (a) call my writer friend and brag, (b) watch an episode of Doctor Who and (c) read a few more chapters in Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn if I finished on time, and I did.
I was originally aiming for 50k in the month of June, but if it continues anywhere close to this pace, I'm going to have to raise my goal. The stuff I'm writing right now is mostly character work and background information. It's in-character, and a lot of it will be going into the actual draft (which works, since I write very-introspective first person), but it isn't traditional narrative. I'm doing Alan Watt's 90 Day Novel program, and I've just finished Day 5's material. I'm going to try to do all the background work (30 days of the 90 day process) in the first half of June, write a long synopsis/really short first draft of the plot (sans introspection and background work) in the second half of June, then combine the two into a genuine full draft during July when CampNaNo opens. Part of my problem when writing the introspective first person narratives in most of my stories is that I can't get the balance right. I kind of wobble all over the place. I figure, if I write them completely separately and then combine them logically, carefully and AFTER I've drafted each part, I'll be able to control the proportions much better. And I'm surprised at the things my characters are telling me in the backstory work that I wouldn't have predicted at all. The story was supposed to be all about Yosseval's magical condition (he's a magic nullifier in a world that functions entirely on magic). Instead, it's mostly about his relationship problems right now (which is totally fine by me, because that ties in VERY heavily with his magic problems, and it's critical to the tragedy at the climax of the story). So Ineroh, the love interest, is getting a lot more attention than I expected her to get. Not complaining. The situation with Ineroh is a good summary for Yosseval's life as a whole, so I'm completely okay with him angsting about her, since (a) it fits with the character, (b) it's not gratuitous (yet), and (c) it's a really comfortable way to sprinkle in exposition while the focus is on another part of the story.
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