NaNoWriMo update: not so much with the Wri, lately.

My wordcount has been stuck at a paltry three-thousand-and-some for days now.  I’m falling way behind.  This is partly because I’ve been reading instead of writing these past few days.

Book club is doing The Poisonwood Bible this month, which is one of my all time favorite books ever. So this makes me very happy to be able to share it with others.  But it’s been a few years since I’ve actually read it, and I find my memory a little sketchy as to some of the details, so I re-read is definately necessary.  I meant to finish it before November so I wouldn’t have to worry about it interfering with my writing, but I couldn’t find my copy, so I kept putting it off until this weekend when I finally found it in a box stored in our extra bedroom.

OMG, I had forgotten how long this book is.  That is probably in part because the first time I read it was long before I had kids, and I was able to read it in a day.  That’s so not happening this time!

But I love it.  I’ve read it so many times, and each time I find some little fantastic detail that I’d missed in all the previous readings.  There is just so much that is good in that book.

And, sadly, it makes me want to give up all pretense of possibly being a real writer someday,  as there is no way anything so marvelous could ever spring forth from my mind and my fingers.
I think wana-be-writers should temper their reading of good work with craptacular works of fiction that have done well.  The good to teach you about writing, the bad to make you think, “hey, even I could do better than that.”

60,493 / 50,000 (120.0%)

At approximately 11:55 PM on Nov 30, after writing 6,715 words in a day to bring my total to 60,493, I typed the last sentence of my novel.

We’ll just pretend that there isn’t a huge chunk missing out of the middle. I just really wanted to write the ending, so when I started today, I picked up pretty close to the final scene. It took me quite a few more words than I’d intended to write the ending - hence the largest daily count so far – but it’s done.

I am so happy it is done. Now comes the dreaded (or not so dreaded; I am looking forward to it in a sick and twisted sort of way) rewrite. In addition to filling in the middle and making edits here and there, I have to pretty much re-write first 20,000 words or so because I made some major changes to my plot line. Still, I am very happy with the story that I am telling now, and I wasn’t when I started, so this is a good thing.

I wrote an average of 2016 words per day which put me just above my goal of 2000. I only actually wrote on twenty-two of the thirty days though, so my average word count for those days was 2750. If only I’d done that every day; I might have finished the book without skipping the middle. Ah well.

This is my brain high on statistics.

For the record, I reached 50,000 on the twenty-fifth. Right on track by my 2000 wpd goal.

My novel only encompasses half of its original scope. Perhaps the second half will come into being as a sequel next November.

I can’t believe that it is over. I can’t believe that I finished.

Oh joy and rapture. Now I can start blogging about something else. I didn’t mean to let this take over so.

I should be done with my novel now. It had been my intention to finish it at the write-in on Sunday, but I then neglected to write Friday or Saturday so Sunday’s 3600 or so odd words still left me about five-thousand or so short. And I haven’t made it much farther since then.

I’m sort of stuck on something because I’ve realized in the middle of the scene that I am writing that I really detest this particular scene. Usually I only discover these sort of things when I am actually done with the scene. I should just abandon it and move on to something else with a note to myself to fix it later, but I seem to be having trouble doing that.

Besides, that isn’t actually what has been keeping me from writing. I’ve been busy with much more important matters like.. um… well. fanfic. Did I say more important matters? I meant complete waste of time matters.

I was well and truly sick of fanfic - as well I should be after how terribly I’ve overdosed on it in the past. I’d sworn that I would only read real books and worthwhile books and fine literature at that. I hadn’t read bit of fanfic (well, good fanfic.. admit there have been a few links to badfic that I couldn’t help but click because I was never one to avoid a good trainwreck) in months.

I’ve officially fallen of the wagon now. I can’t even remember what happened or how it started. I’m back on fanfic, and it’s running through my veins and taking over my mind and I just can’t stop.

But now I am summoning all my will power, and I will stop. Cold turkey at that. No more evil fanfic for me! I have the strength, I have the power, I think I can I think I can I think I can…

Really. It’s back to writing for me. No more fanfic.

Just as soon as I finish this one last story…

*thud*

Do I have anything to talk about besides writing these days? Why yes, I do. I’m just not going to.

I’ve been majorly slacking this past bit. I fell woefully and terribly behind. Except since I was so far ahead, my falling terribly behind didn’t leave me in such a bad place.

Writing 5135 words for Tuesday this week certainly helped. I’m back on track. Now I just need to write a little over three-thousand words tomorrow (which doesn’t sound so bad after today’s output) and I’ll be back to meeting my goal of 2000 wpd average.

The few of you reading my weblog will know exactly how I am doing since I have a handy section in my sidebar with all my daily accounts and some statistics from my spreadsheet, but I feel the need to bore the majority who read this in livejournal as well, so here we go:

My formerly beautiful spreadsheet has aquired a number of unsightly zeroes. There are now four days when I wrote nothing at all. My lowest count on a day that I wrote was 349 words. I have three other days when I didn’t even come close to meeting the 1667 wpd needed to finish, but every other day I’ve been well over my goal of 2000 wpd.

The 349 count day was Nov 8, and all the non-writing days were after it. On November 7 my average WPD was 2605. Now it has fallen down to 1921, and yesterday (before the addition of the 5135) it was much worse.

Still, I only need to write 1376 words for each of the remaining days to finish. Go me.

I need to stop being so obsessed with my statistics. You don’t even want to know just how often I glance at my spreadsheet.

30,735 / 50,000 (61.0%)

.

I am in a bit of a slump writing wise. I feel like I’d be ripping through the words at breakneck pace if only I tossed out most of what I’ve already written and started afresh. I’ve had a few new ideas for the book that I truly believe are a vast improvement from what I had planned, but alas they require major changes to preceding events.

I’ve been down this road before though. I have plenty of other projects where I just kept writing and rewriting the beginning and burned out on the story long before I got to the end. I’m determined not to do that this time, and I want to finish for nano as well and I couldn’t make it if I started over now even if I did keep large lumps, so I can’t let myself do that. What I’m trying to do is to make notes of what I need to change and then keep writing as if I had already done them.

Even when Nano ends – and I won’t be done with my book then as it looks to be quite a bit longer than fifty-thousand words – I don’t want to go back and rewrite until I have reached then end. It is a new way for me, and I think that it will be a great improvement over past methods, but it is really to force myself to plod on to uncharted territory while my heart is in fixing scenes already written

As part of combatting this, I open a fresh text file each day to write in, and then I close it at the end of the day. Once the file is closed, I am not allowed to re-open it until I reach the end, so I can only make changes to the current day’s writing. I keep track of names and details that I might need to refer to in a little notebook to keep myself from having to open and older file to look somethng up and thus being tempted to change something.

How does everyone else deal with the urge to look back and edit?

So Sunday Munchkin was quite sick and Monday I was quite sick and Tuesday and Wednesday I just plain had stuff to do. That’s where I’ve been.

The sickness was no fun at all, but fortunately for each of us it passed within twenty-four hours. I’m thinking that it might have been minor food poisoning since M didn’t get it and Munchkin and I share a lot of food.

We bought new cutting boards today. These ones are acrylic and won’t absorb anything or scratch. The old plastic ones are stained and scratched and really hard to clean well. They were quite possibly the source of the problem.

All this – along with the arrival of a package of some lovely fabric which induced an immediate sewing frenzy which I will discuss some other time – was not exactly conducive to writing.

I haven’t updated the counts in the sidebar of my blog in several days, but there wasn’t much to record anyway. Monday I wrote only about three hundred words, and Tuesday and Wednesday resulted in a grand total of zero between the two of them. I was a bit ahead before, so I was still on track as far as the average of 1667 I needed to finish, but I was behind on my goal of 2000 a day.

I’m back on track though thanks to today’s (Thursday’s) write in. I can’t remember exactly how many words I got in, but I remember that I left off with 22,222 as my total because it was such a neat number to end on.

As of midnight..

5,763 / 50,000 (11.0%)

Most of today’s 3025 words were written in the wee hours of the morning before CNN took over my brain. By this time I normally would have written quite a bit more for today’s total, but somehow my heart just isn’t in it.