NaNoWriMo Progress + What I’m Reading in the Dead of Night

Remember, my word count started when I already had 60K+ words written. Last night’s total word count was 77,422, of a projected 100,000, so I’m closing in on THAT goal, if slightly behind on my 50,000. But I think I’ll make it!

It occurred to me after doing it a few times that posting constantly about NaNoWriMo word count progress could make the whole thing NaNoWriMo experience less fun for some people. I’m not really super competitive, and I really hate when other people feel like they’re doing less in comparison with me.

I want to tell this circle of friends and colleagues: you know, I don’t have kids. I don’t have full time work; I’m an audiobook narrator with no book on the books till December! I have a lot more time to write than a lot of people, and I still find it hard to write! I re-joined NaNoWriMo for the incredible energy of knowing THOUSANDS OF WRITERS are just… MAKING STUFF UP this month!

ME TOO YES PLEASE!

Now, I’m not doing too badly. Not on POINT exactly with my desired 2000 words a day, but still, very pleased, and making progress. I’m super pleased that my new friend Ben, whom we met this year at GenCon, is ROCKING his first NaNoWriMo. Talk about word count–and he’s doing it on his lunch breaks and early in the morning, like a BOSS! I sort of live vicariously through him.

This last week’s work on Saint Death’s Herald (or “Harold” as my mom, Clarence, and J9 are calling it) has been a pretty big set-piece battle scene. Like Hamlet is a seven-soliloquy play that the rest of the plot sort of dangles from, Saint Death’s Herald seems to have a 4-battle structure, with all my favorite bits happening in between the fighting. The limestone bridge chapter, for example, is my favorite chapter so far. But I like any scene where my characters sit, eat, and chat. Maybe play some music if their fingers aren’t too cold. You know?

But, so, as I’ve been writing and trying to make word count, I seem to be falling into habits of my twenties, which I graciously, um, aged out of in my mid-thirties and forties. Like staying up till 1 AM writing. >.>

But, look. It’s also so exciting, in some ways, to stay up till my brain is befogged and my mind is bedazzled. I can’t think in linear lines anymore. There comes a point in the night where I can’t edit any of the text anymore. I just have to… jump. Think: “Oh, I’ll make sense of it later. Because I literally can’t right now.’

It starts to go more like… “Oh, I think there’s a sentence about six sentences ahead that I haven’t written yet, so I’ll write this sentence now and fit it in later.” Or, “Hey, I think this is the next thing that that other character does, even though I don’t know the rest of the thing THIS character that this character is doing, but everything’s boring, so I’m just gonna leave this boring character here mid-sentence and go write that other more interesting and shiny paragraph for a while.”

The results of this week’s writing are, therefore, what I’ve started calling, just now, “an archipelago draft” of a chapter. There are OH SO MANY islands of unconnected text that are now my solemn duty, by the light of day, to string together into a (as Desiree says in A Little Night Music) “sort of coherent existence after so many years of muddle.”

And by years, I mean “nights,” of course.

The fact that my sleep schedule is now whacked, that I go through my days a bit dozy and ditzy, and that when I’m not writing all night, I’m up till 3 AM–last last night–reading Holly Black’s Folk of Air series is all a part of NaNoWriMo’s collateral damage. Or maybe collateral bonus?

Hurry up, NYPL; I need my Queen of Nothing book stat! Don’t make me wait 4 AGONIZING weeks for the third movement of a frikkin trilogy!

Ah! One of three books I bought at Book Moon Books is now FINISHED. Cruel Prince is the first of Holly Black’s Folk of Air series. DELICIOUS! It would pair nicely with Naomi Novik’s Scholomance trilogy. Mmn. Maybe I’ll try the Older next. That will be a TREAT!