Critical NaNoWriMo weekend ahead. The past week has been a struggle—as previous writmos presaged it would be.
But even when you steel yourself against a challenge, things always have a way of blindsiding you. This experience is going right for the jugular and the juggler, as I stay on top of a daily minimum word count of 1,667 words, hold down two jobs, and deal with the interrupted sleep pattern.
I will say this. It’s AMAZING how much you can get done with just an hour or two a day. But that’s writing every day. If I get nothing more out of the experience than this, I’ve learned that it’s less painful to spend time with your work than to avoid it altogether.
A short recap and I’m off to early sleep for the regular 4-5 a.m. wakeup.
The first, oh, one or two thousand word was painful as hell to write. Throat-clearing, awkward, chug-a-chug-a-chug-a-chug…slow slow slow…
Then, about middle of last week, I hit a stride. Some surprising things came out, but it’s all a blur. I haven’t gone back to edit much, if anything. What’s saving me, I think, is Scrivener. If I’d attempted this in Microsoft Word, I’d have a mess of documents, all titled something different and all scattered in folder of God-knows-what. With Scrivener, the time I took setting up my folders according to my basic outline (I didn’t do a step outline, just sketched in where certain story points would turn, and foldered accordingly).
Rewrite will be interesting, but we’ll worry about that once NaNo is over. For my story, there’ve been two challenges, the protagonist’s first-person narrative, and the catalyst character’s third-person omniscient narrative. Don’t know what will survive rewrite, but I’m finding it way easier to breeze through the former over the latter in draft mode.
Now, some sweet sweet sleep!