NaNoWriMo, Day 4

[afterallthistime]

Here I am, on my flex bock at work, NOT doing NaNoWriMo. YAY!

Actually, since I have 82 minutes plus my lunch (plus a little extra, since the BCBA and case manager are encouraging me to sort of "skip out" as often as possible to give my kid a chance to adjust to not having an aide by his side full-time), I still have plenty of time to write. Also, at nearly 4000 words, I'm only a day behind (meaning I need to make-up yesterday's word count and produce today's, but seing as how, in the nine years (yipes!) I've been doing NaNo, I've often had to catch up somewhere in the realm of 5,000 words in one go, I'm not exceedingly worried).

What I am worried about is how much I already hate my plot. When vague ideas finally started forming (like, at 2 am on November 1st), I thought I had the bud of a great mainstream adult fiction novel blossoming in my brain... then I started writing, and suddenly the entire tone screamed Young Adult novel, which, hey, in and of itself, is not bad.

Then I actually started churning out signifigant wordage, and at that point it became a Very Bad Thing. Basically the entire first chapter is an info dump - like, a ridiculous ammount of awkwardly-worded and ponderously detailed exposition - that simultaneously manages to say abso-fucking-loutely nothing. I have really nowhere to go beyond this point, which, given that it's still only week one, and I'm a day behind, is already not boding well for the success of this endeavor.

Still, I'm trying to tell myself that the lasting result of doing NaNo is, as always, getting into the habit of producing something everyday, and hopefully of learning how to silence, with at least some moderate degree of success, the voice inside my head that constantly tells me what a hack I am and that I should almost definitely be on Ritalin, and goads that while I'm wasting my time writing, I could easily be wasting my time doing any number of other, less frustrating but equally frivolous tasks.

Post-NaNo, I still have hopes of self-publishing by (or just after) the new year - not my NaNo novel, but the book of poetry I keep swearing I'll finish "next week," "next month," "whenever I damn well feel like, okay?" If I can condition myself to write everyday, and not instantly pan everything I've produced out of hand, then maybe there's hope for me yet.

Oh, also, my novel: teenage boy finds out his girlfriend is pregnant. Hijinks ensue. Stuff happens. Thrilling original, isn't it?

Fellow NaNo-ers, good luck; if you are anything like me, you will need it in spades.

Comments

[triviaphilia.livejournal.com]

I'm also struggling with my NaNo already, but you're right, it's really more of an exercise in getting into the habit of writing every day. (That was a very awkward sentence.) What's your username on there?

Have you seen Jottify.com for self-publishing? I'm on there and it seems pretty easy to set yourself up :)

[sumofherregrets.livejournal.com]

Ooh, no, I've never seen Jottify! I'm familiar with Blurb and LuLu, and love hear about more self-publishing options. I'll have to check them out.

I'm PerfectMistake on the forums, but I'm not really posting until I (at the very least) catch up :-/

[larivee22.livejournal.com]

Sometimes when that happens I like to print it all out and work on paper. There's just something about having a physical document that helps sometimes.

[sumofherregrets.livejournal.com]

Were I just writing at my own pace, I'd totally do that. But I'm a crazy slow handwriter if i want ANY semblance of legibility (because of the way I grip my pen), and I'm trying to fly through the word count as fast as I can.

[larivee22.livejournal.com]

I have doctor handwriting, which is why I'm not too worried about people reading my journals after I die, because good luck with that. I usually print in the spaces between the sentences when I use that method, so it's somewhat easy to read what I've read. I don't know if it'd work if I had to keep up with a wordcount, because things like wordcounts (and scales) are things I've had to train myself not to think about, as per therapist's orders. It is, however, a good method for coming up with random workable ideas.