It's been a long few weeks, what with NaNoWriMo and various other life/family happenings, plus the inevitable busyness that comes with senior year. I haven't been blogging due to these various things, which is something I am hoping to rectify and make a new post at least weekly.
NaNo 2015: The Story So Far
NaNoWriMo this year has been a whirlwind of sleep deprivation, friend encouragement, and copious consumption of English Breakfast tea. I've laughed, I've cried, and I've punched things. Seriously.
I think the best way to explore my experience so far is to make a list. So, here we are.
1) I lost 14,000 words.
Yes, dear readers, it is a sad story but a true one. They say every relationship has its own system of give-and-take, and it's no different with distraction free writing programs. The give? A nice, simple, clean environment to write, with handy little things like timers and word count widgets to help you reach your goal. The take? No backups in-program.
My first disaster cost me only 2k (I say only because the second dwarfed the first). I was using a nifty little program called Quiet Writer that gives a gorgeous fullscreen space of creative freedom, but in a nasty design flaw the 'clear' button is just underneath the 'fullscreen'. I lost all my work, but had saved most of it to a Google Document and only lost about 2k, which I made up and did not put toward my final wordcount on the NaNo site.
Disaster No. 2 was a real week-ruiner. I was using my normal writing program, Pillarbox. It's a nice gray space with typewriter scrolling, a timer, and a word count goal widget. It has no fullscreen fuction, and no backup. It saves what you last wrote, like Quiet Writer, but nothing before the last time it saved. This time my errant fingers somehow tapped a few keys and viola, all my words had once again vanished. I had neglected to back up any more than I backed up last time, except for this time the loss was much greater.
I would be a liar if I said that there were no tears shed over the loss of my precious words. It was not a good day for me.
However, on day one, I made up 7k of the lost words and did count the new ones toward my NaNo progress (so the actual word count of my novel is well behind what it reads on the site). Eventually I got over the loss and moved on, angrily plugging away at my story.
2) I am now off my outline.
Ah, yes. I have a bad habit of starting my outline late and then putting it off and putting it off until lo and behold, it's the first of November and my outline is only thirty scenes long! However, I bravely plunged headfirst into my draft, thinking it'll be forever until I reach the end of this outline and I already know how this story is going to end, so I don't need an outline for the entire book.
So, I kept going, my outline keeping me on track as I glided through my pre-planned, pre-plotted story, consulting it often to see what plot points I needed to hit and where I needed to address certain issues.
Then, one fine morn, I awaken and begin to prepare to write. I look at my outline and realize with a shock that there is no more. I chide my Past Self for her laziness and her insistence on finishing Merlin before November began. She's done nothing but create problems for me, and I am not favorably inclined towards her.
All this to say, I'm off script now and just making things up as I go along. I know where I'm headed, but things have a real tendency to fly out of control in the home stretch of my books. I wish I had finished my outline beforehand, and saved watching the last season of Merlin for the afternoons in November that, if I had an outline to keep me on track, I could have spent watching Netflix instead of worrying about how I would get my characters where they needed to be.
For shame, Past Self.
For shame.
3) I'm rather unhappy with my word count.
It looks really good on the NaNo website (almost 45k as we speak), but my novel is turning out to be really short (33k). I don't really like that, but I know some things I can do to make it longer in further edits. Plus I can probably stretch out the ending a little bit more, which I will endeavor to do as I enter the "home stretch" of NaNoWriMo 2015.
Overall, it's been a long few weeks filled with scheduling conflicts, tears, and emotional whining about all matter of things. However, I am pressing forward in the hope of hitting 50k on Saturday, and making it up to at least 40k in my rough draft.
Thanks for reading this update, and hopefully you'll be hearing more from me soon.
Also, to all my fellow Wrimos:
