Going Backwards

I am the proud owner of 23,000 words of original writing. (Well, not very original writing but I wrote it all myself!) That makes me 10,000 words behind my goal for today.

Yesterday I cut 7,000 words from my story. It was going in the wrong direction and I wasn't liking it. I could see where I'd taken a wrong turning, so I went back to that point and put the 7k words that came next into an "out takes" document. That was less painful than screwing them up and putting them in the bin.

I need to write 2,500 words a day now if I want to get to 50k by the end of November. I don't think I'm going to make it, but at least what I'll have written will be something I'll like. Or I can hope so anyway.

Yesterday I went skating at Somerset House with My Beloved, then we took Boris Bikes to Tate Britain and saw the Late Turner Exhibition.

There's something about seeing famous paintings in real life that you just can't beat. Some of them seem less wonderful (I'm thinking of Manet here). Most of them are more impressive. I loved the picture of a ship in a snow storm and yet the reproduction here really doesn't do it justice.

POV

I'm eleven thousand words into NaNoWriMo and only a few hundred words behind. Which is just as well seeing that tomorrow we're going up to London to skate at Somerset House and then visit the Turner Exhibition at Tate Britain.

I started out writing in third person but after only a few paragraphs I changed to first. I can see where it happened. There was some dialogue which included the character saying "I", and after that it was "I" all the way! So I nipped back and changed the first few paragraphs to match.

It's Nano. If I'm going to write fifty thousand words this month I have to go with whatever works!

I didn't mean to

I wasn't going to do NaNoWriMo this year. When a friend posted on Facebook on November 2nd about being unprepared, I found myself in the same situation. I had no plot, no characters and no ideas. All I had was a blank spreadsheet ready for me to put in my daily word count.

But somehow my friend's post spurred me on and I wrote 2,000 words. I did the same again today. Suddenly I've got a story happening and I have no idea where it's going. It's quite exciting to see what's appearing on the screen.

I don't think I've ever tackled Nano with less preparation and I didn't think it could be done. I'm still not entirely sure but I think I might be doing Nano after all.