NaNoWriMo ~ The Second Week
There are probably some of you out there wondering just how I’m doing with my NaNo project.
First of all, I have a name for it. Who knows how long I’ll keep the name, but currently it is titled “Mission of Mercy”. The hero is a DEA agent (for the time being), and the heroine is a nun. So far this missive has garnered over 19,000 words, or nearly 2k a day average.
I’d like to say I write 2k a day, but I don’t. If I’m really fortunate, I get about 1.5k in. What has made a difference for me though, are timed writings.
I’ve written about timed writings before, but an author, Dawn Montgomery suggested doing this corporately for NaNo at the Realms of Love chat room on Saturday and Sunday of each NaNo weekend.
At 6:00 AM, 1:00 PM and 5:00 PM (Mountain time), we meet at RoL, post our current word counts, then at the command of our leader write for 20 minutes. At the end of the 20 minutes, we post our new word count. We do this anywhere from two -four times per session. Amazingly, to me at least, I get anywhere from 400-nearly 600 words written in each of those blasts.
My word count literally went from 12,413 on Friday evening to 19,691 by last night. I managed to hit all three sessions yesterday, but only stayed for an hour. On Saturday, I only made two as I was at an all day workshop. Still it doesn’t take an Einstein to see the huge leaps of progress I made over the weekend.
How much of it is a keeper? Who knows. But that’s not really the point of NaNo which drives some people a little bit crazy. There are two points to NaNo, in my humble opinion. One is to free your creativity from the evil editor hag that keeps on telling you that you’re no good, your writing is sucky, and that somehow you aren’t good enough to even consider yourself an author. The other is to show you in a very real, physical way, that it is a) possible to write that much in a month and b) that you really can write a story to completion.
Editing and judgment come later. Have fun now.