NaNoWriMo Day 25: 50k!

Woohoo!! Not nearly finished with the revision. Not even the first half rewrite. Still lots of work ahead, but whew! Been a tough fought 50k! Hooray! :::happydance:::

NaNoWriMo Progress Day 20

Well, the characters are finally in Bath! (Bath, UK, that is.) I thought they’d never get there. I kept writing and writing and they kept staying in place. Or going to new places. Basically having minds of their own rather than getting to the next place I wanted them to get. (How did they end up in Plymouth anyway? Who’s in charge here?)

So, they’re going to spend a few days in Bath to see the sights and visit all the Jane Austen related places, and then they go back to Manchester where things progress pretty much as the rough draft does, so I think I’ll be reusing scenes again. And then there’s the whole climax, which needs to be rewritten (or maybe just revised?) and the end of the first half. And that is all that is really my NaNoWriMo goal. Rewrite the first half. The ending needs rewriting, too, but I’m not as concerned with that.

So, I’m in a good place. I hope to have them back in Manchester by the end of the week.

Road trips are amazingly difficult to write during NaNoWriMo. Especially when they’re through places I’ve never been. GoogleMaps and GoogleEarth (and all the people who have contributed to both) have been invaluable!

10 days and 11k words to go. Maybe I’ll just finish by the end of Thanksgiving weekend.

NaNoWriMo Day 17 Progress

Moving right along. I’m nearing the point where I sort of slow down on the words, though, because there’s a lot that I can reuse from the rough draft with just some minor revising. I’m almost finished with the first half, which was what needed the major rewrite. I keep thinking I am, anyway. Things just keep getting added…

NaNoWriMo Day 14 Progress – Halfway there

So I’m a full day ahead now. I thought about not writing today, but revising instead. I had the day off, and when I got to Starbucks (my writing place) at 8:00, the new scenes started flowing. There was a heavy dose of GoogleEarth research to be done (virtually touring London while my characters were really doing so), and in 4 hours I wrote 3k words. I was surprised it was so many. So, that worked. I guess I’ll save the revising for Thanksgiving weekend, if I don’t still have new writing to do.

I’m halfway through–chronologically–the first half of the story. The second half of the story is what mostly just needs revising rather than rewriting–until the end, which needs to be completely redone. So I think I’m more confident that I’ll have the 50k new words. I’m concerned I’ll still be at too many words over 100k for the whole things, but that’s not something to fret about this month. Cuts can be done later.

NaNoWriMo Day 12: Progress

Well, I’m moving right along, and I’m pretty happy with what I’ve written. I hope the pace is good, that’s my one concern. I have a romance developing, and I’m a little concerned that I’m doing too much too soon (I had the same problem with Love Bytes, the novel that I just revised.) It’s tricky, but I won’t know if it’s okay until I’ve gone back and revised the scenes that I’ve marked for re-use from the rough draft, and then re-read the thing. So I’m just plowing ahead and hoping for the best.

This is a crazy weekend, but it’s been good. The Philharmonic has a concert tomorrow, so this morning was a rehearsal, then I spent about three hours at Starbucks writing. Tomorrow I’ll spend the morning at Starbucks, then be downtown by 2:30. The other normal weekend stuff has to fit in there as well. I don’t know how we did it the years Steve was doing NaNoWriMo, too. He’s not doing it this year, so we’ve kept up with everything! (I do miss my write-in partner tho’.)

My characters are in London at last! I think I’m going to end up with too many words in the first half, but I can always cut later.

NaNoWriMo: Day 10

Still on track, though I’m a little concerned about having 50k worth of stuff to write. I’ve gone and looked back over my rough draft and there is a lot that I can re-use. I’ll have to revise it, but I’m not counting that sort of thing toward NaNo. Only new scenes and new words.

But we’ll see.

I keep thinking to myself that this is the last time I do a re-write for NaNoWriMo. But really, I’ve gotten further doing this now than I did on the three attempts outside of November. So it’s hard, and a little frustrating with the whole word count thing, but even if I don’t make it to 50k, for my own purposes, it’s still a win. I would like to finish the revision by the end of the month, but that might be asking too much.

NaNoWriMo: Day 8 Progress

I caught up to the word count goal yesterday, and every word was like drawing blood. This is hard! I was thinking yesterday that three years ago when this novel was a new-write instead of a re-write, I hit 50k on November 7, and finished at 163k on the 29th. Obviously, the story was a mess, which is why the rewrite this year, but those numbers are definitely more what I’m used to. Being right at the pace for 50k is unusual for me. Hah. It’s nice for my friends, though. Some of them are enjoying being ahead of me in word count at this point.

I am making some forward progress, and that’s good. That’s the point. I’m having to work a lot with what’s been previously written (so my word count is not reflecting work put in, I comfort myself with that, LOL.) I’m even going back through the rough draft and catching what I can reuse from that as well. I actually had some good stuff in there, mixed in with the bad.

So, now let’s see if I can keep up with the 1,667 words per day NaNo pace, along with the revising and reorganizing. There’s plenty more to fill in. And after this weekend, I will have plenty of time.

Day 5

NaNoWriMo word count. I’m a little behind, but I’m doing more work than the word count indicates. It’s been a bit of a struggle. I wrote the first 4,000 words thinking I was just going to write from scratch, and every scene I wrote I remembered writing before and I liked the original better. So finally I gave up and went back to the revision I started in December. I actually liked what I wrote then. I was on the right track, I just got frustrated with some timing issues. So for the past two days I’ve been working those scenes to fit them into my new timeline, and writing some new scenes to fill in what I’ve changed. I’m only counting the new writing toward NaNo (and I’m including those first 4k words that I’ve now nixed–dangit, they were writing!)

For the revision purposes, though, these are my numbers. I’ve got more words than I thought, but the scenes that I took from the earlier rewrite do need to be revised (I’m not doing so now) and I’m sure there will be some cuts. There had better be, or this will still be a 150k novel, and that’s not good!

Progress

T-minus 28 hours or so…

Wow. I’ve been unprepared before. But never quite like this.

I suppose I shouldn’t fret. Since I’m doing the rewrite I should know what I’m doing, pretty much, right?

I’m nervous. I worry about how much time I’ll actually have. I worry that the ideas will start and then fizzle out. I worry that the ideas won’t start at all. I still don’t know where to begin this darned story.

I haven’t thought about it at all in the last few days. I did some loose brainstorming early last week, right after finishing the Love Bytes revision. But since then, nothing.

And I haven’t been participating in the forum on the NaNo site. I just don’t feel it this year. I’ve done it without participating much before. Last year, in fact, I think I only went to one write-in. I spent most of my time at the Brownsburg Starbucks, and that’s probably what I’ll do again this year. It actually helps sharing this with my husband now. He joked earlier today that I’m probably wishing he’d quit participating now so that he can do the bulk of the housework and cooking during November and leave me to write. But I don’t. I really like sharing this with him. It’s a short time of the year where we’re both working toward a common goal, finishing 50k words in 30 days. Our interests are so divergent other than this! (Especially since the Colts aren’t giving us anything to cheer about…which gives me three extra hours every weekend that I haven’t had in past years. )

So, I’m so not ready. But I will start writing on Tuesday. Maybe tomorrow I’ll try to hammer down when to start the story. Then just go from there. I have two free drink coupons and a $10 Starbucks gift card to start me out for the month, too.