NaNoWriMo 2016: Week 1 Recap!

The first week of NaNoWriMo is officially at an end!

Summary: Boy-oh-boy, it's hard this time around! I don't know what it is... maybe because work is so much more involved (which is a REALLY GOOD thing, don't get me wrong) this year than in years past, I just feel like I'm not blasting through the plot on all 4 cylinders like I have in the past. Maybe that's a good thing, because it means I have so much material that I can produce these thick, beefy chapters, consistently over the minimum—it means I can reach the word goal of 50K words long before I reach the last chapters of the 20 I have planned. However, it also means that I am spending large amounts of time on these “boring” introductory chapters, and I just have to hope I won’t burn out before I finally reach the “good parts” of the story!

Daily Run-down:

Tuesday: Woo! Barely out of the gate… and already WAY behind… Didn’t exactly get any writing done during the day, and came home from work largely exhausted, so blah! Three hand-written pages in my notebook ended up only amounting to less than 750 words, and by the time I got them all copied down at the end of the day, I didn’t have very much energy to do more than double that… which is still less than the daily average should be. I don’t know, maybe I can make it up later?

Wednesday: Running at a deficit definitely bites—more so when I’m STILL in Chapter 1! Good grief, when I made these notes I don’t think I anticipated just how long I would be able to draw out a single conversation, nor how easily I would be able to transition between conversations with the characters. It just happens that way when I have “in the moment” reactions going for my characters. Maybe planning and thinking about them for so long ahead of time really helped me to be able to devise how each would naturally have a distinct reaction from each other. HELP ME I AM STILL BEHIND BY LIKE 800 WORDS!!

Thursday: My first write-in! I am proud of myself. Last year about the only “community participation” I ever did was the Kick-Off, one leg of the Write-in-Motion, and the TGIO party… So glad I met some socially proactive people at the Kick-Off this year! I could only stay an hour and a half, and I did it by hand, not on the computer, but I definitely filled two whole pages! So what if it only amounted to less than 1,600 words? Finishing Chapter 1 was totally worth it! Spending 3 days on a single chapter (well okay, one chapter and a prologue) may feel a little backward and depressing, but this next chapter is going to be fun, and I foresee more of a chance to see how far I get through it!

Friday: Cursing parrots. That’s what this has come to. I have taken the phrase “the parrots are swearing” from my notes and I have padded my narrative by including repeated phrases that you will never EVER hear me utter—but I typed them out for the sake of the word count. (For those interested in seeing the draft on Wattpad when I start posting it, I will be mincing the oaths and softening them considerably, so no worries!) It’s kind of fun—they’re adopted from the local animal shelter as a mated pair, so of course, Edie—being the romantic-nerd-girl at heart, names them Gomez and Morticia… but the swearing! It’s cathartic, to say the least—but it also feels a bit scandalous. AND I AM STILL FREAKING BEHIND BY LIKE 700 WORDS!! I need help. Oh, and also, I did a Very Dumb Thing—I went to the library. To pick up “one hold.” Of course, I came out with no less than SEVEN books… which I am (ostensibly) “NOT GOING TO READ” (or so I told myself) because I have SOOO many ebooks to work through and SOO much writing to catch up on. So that is a thing that happened, and this does not bode well for me!

Saturday: Help has arrived in the form of HELLO I AM SETTING UP MY OWN WRITE-IN! I posted it the night before, and by the next morning, a few people had responded! Totally doing this thing! I get to the (I thought) agreed upon location… who knew that Salmon Creek would be one of those places that had STARBUCKS LITERALLY LESS THAN A MINUTE APART??? It took a while but we were finally all together, three of us (and, for once, somebody from my “team”!) and WOOHOO I blasted through to the end of Chapter 2!! (Is it telling that I chose to write the bulk of this blog post on this day as a sneaky way of making up my deficit?) I am now officially ahead of “word par” and it feels so much better! Looking forward to another productive day of writing (in spite of all the goings-on that I have on Sunday) that will put me AHEAD going into the next work week!
 

Sunday: 10K in the bag! I actually managed to make up the difference quite quickly, on account of getting antsy for the “fun part” starting in Chapter 8, when they’re all in the Amazon Rainforest and about to get split up, some captured, and others attacked by a caiman. I blitzed out about a thousand words there, even though, chronologically speaking, I should be working on Chapter 3. The story is coming so much easier now, it’s kind of amazing. I have had a really productive weekend, and I couldn’t be happier!

Monday: (Today) Okay so… not much writing accomplished at work (of course not!) which puts me kind of behind the eight-ball for today, but with the weekend’s accomplishments, I am fairly certain that I will be able to make up the deficit. My hope is to be able to gain and overtake the daily word goal, now that I am no longer at SUCH a deficit like I was at the beginning. And knowing that I actually can make up the difference over a weekend is helpful! (Especially since not every weekend is going to be as busy as the one I just had! Yay for more writing time!)

On to Week 2! Once I finish Chapter 3, the real fun begins, as all the characters have been introduced, and it’s time to set events in motion to get the story moving! Keep an eye out for excerpts this coming week, and feel free to leave a comment on any previous post, to motivate me to keep writing! Thanks!

P.S. Oh, also, one small note, in case you were wanting to read the "Clan of Outcasts" series all in order, to get a real sense of the whole story going on, I’ve gone through and added “Next Post” links to every post, so you can start HERE for Part 1 and read all the way through to the end! I hope you enjoy it!