The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and I have added a few bricks to the highway myself, namely with this blog. I had wanted to update this blog daily through the month of November, but then I forgot that there was this little presidential election occurring, and well, if I wasn't writing for Nanowrimo, I was watching the news or following Twitter watching the results unspool at an excruciatingly slow pace. I didn't even journal, which is something I do every day. The election was all-consuming, and when it was finally called for Biden, I was able to relax a little and start to focus on other things.
My Nanowrimo 2020 experiment is off to a pretty good start. I currently sit about 3000 words behind the pace I set for myself in order to hit 75k for the month; this represents the day I only wrote a few hundred words because I couldn't find time to write. So when I am sitting down and giving myself the time and remove the distractions, I am hitting my marks and the story is moving along nicely.
Ideally, I write during the morning and then later in the day spend some time planning for the next day. It's only worked out that way a couple of times, but when it has, I have felt much better prepared for the coming writing session.
The hardest thing I've had to deal with in this story is deciding who the main character is at his core. I'm actually still not settled, despite being over a week into the project. But this also ties into my approach to most writing projects—the first draft is me telling myself the story, and then after that I will rewrite using what I think works best. So its almost like I'm trying different actors out at the role, and seeing how each one's take on the character changes the story, and then which of those takes fits best for the story I'm trying to tell. This all goes back to preparation and how I should have done more prep work, but writing wouldn't be writing if I wasn't lamenting the fact that I didn't do enough to prepare myself. One day I may learn how to master the art of preparing for a writing project, but I'm not holding my breath.
It's early enough in the month that I'm not too concerned with making up the word count deficit in a single day session. I do recognize that, because of the much larger daily word goal, I cannot miss any days without putting myself in a much deeper hole than I'm used to, but I think with how I've been able to keep up a really solid pace every day, I'll be able to chip away at the paucity of words a little at a time until it is gone. Consistency, as always, is key.
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