Things are still going well at the moment. At the end of Day Ten (the 1/3 mark), I am on 19,040 words, nearly 1.5 days ahead of schedule. Of all my NaNoWriMos, this is my second best Day Ten wordcount. My best was my very first back in 2009 when I had managed nearly 21k by this point – partly out of fresh enthusiasm, partly out of having more time on my hands, and partly because I knew there would be a couple of days that month where I wouldn’t be able to write.
In that year, I burst out of the starting blocks but ended up slowing to a crawl around Days 18-23 where I really couldn’t see where to go next. Here, as in most of my NaNos, I’m maintaining more of a steady pace – though, as I know I’ll have at least one unavailable day this year too, I’m determined to stay ahead of the target. Of course, there may well come a point when I just get tired and lost as well; it’s good to be ahead in case that happens.
So far, I’m still enjoying my writing sessions each day, but it’s taking some effort as well, even though (or possibly because) I tend to write pretty fast. On a good day, I can do the 1,666 words in about an hour. At weekends, I’ve been tending to do it all in one go; whereas on weekdays I still do a bit in the mornings before work, which makes things easier in the evening when I come home feeling a bit tired.
The writing process hasn’t been totally cohesive. In previous years, I’ve skipped ahead to scenes I want to write. Here, I’ve been skipping ahead to moments within scenes, just because they wandered into my mind and I wanted to get them down before I forgot to include them. I have, however, been filling in the gaps afterwards, so the story is currently one cohesive whole – for the moment.
And despite being 19k words in, I’m still technically around the beginning of the story, playing with the characters, their relationships and their knowledge in anticipation of events to come. In terms of the Snowflake Method, which has you making a four-page synopsis, I’m still on Page One. To turn into a publishable novel, this would almost certainly require some trimming – but in the current context, it at least gives me confidence that I have enough story to make it to 50,000 words!
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