The good news: I'm still doing great at NaNoWriMo. I'm up to over 17,000 words, which means I'm way ahead schedule. My stats page says I only need to write about 1,300 to finish on time and that so far my average per day has been almost 3,000 words.
The mixed news: I have had to push through a couple of scenes. This means that they are not catching my attention enough to really enjoy writing them, which means that a reader certainly won't get really absorbed in reading them. This fact tells me that there is something going on in these particular scenes that will take some revision. It's not a huge deal.
For example, in one scene, my main character is seeking some information. I don't think I have the opposing character's motivations worked out well enough to make that scene really snap yet. But he will be involved later in the book, perhaps the later scenes will shed some light on this earlier one. I intend this character to be a thorn in Dakotashi's side for many books to come, so he needs to be fun to write! I didn't concentrate enough on setting him up during my brainstorming sessions because I was focusing more on the actual villain for this book.
The (possibly) bad news: At this rate, I'm afraid of running out of scenes to write before I get to 50k. This is only a problem if I'm worried about winning NaNoWriMo this year. It just means that this book isn't 100k. That's fine, as my real goal is to finish the book, right?
So far I have written approximately 13 scenes. (A few of them have been broken down into more than one piece that I haven't given a separate scene document to in my Scivener binder. One of these scenes was a surprise to me that I didn't have planned ahead of time.) I have 16 more scenes planned. If I estimate a little more words than the 17k I've written for the 13 scenes I've written so far, let's say 20k, that will be a total of 37k, not really anywhere close to the 50k needed to NaNoWriMo.
Well, I knew this might happen when I decided to finish the book I started last year instead of starting something new.
What can I do to try and add more words as I go? Well, one of the 16 scenes I have planned is actually the climax, which will turn out to be more than one scene for sure. I'm just not certain what's going to happen so I haven't planned it out yet. I figure it will come to me. I hope it will anyway. And then there are the requisite tying-things-up scenes after the climax as well. So that should add a pretty hefty chunk to my estimate.
Also, I can make sure to write more description. It's not my favorite thing to write and requires a lot of effort on my part to think of, which is why I tend to give it short thrift during nano, but I'm far enough ahead in my word count now that I can afford to spend some extra time on descriptive details if it will pile up some words for me. And it will be good for me too.
Anyway, there you have it! It's been exciting to see my word count climb up and check of the scenes I've had planned in my head. Hopefully, in week two, which is usually much harder than week one, I can continue the trend. Really, if I can finish my book AND get to 50k before my Thanksgiving vacation, that would be really, really awesome.
One more thing: GO RAVENS!!!! Let's beat the Steelers tonight.
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