I was going great guns with Nanowrimo. I’d written 22K in the first 16 days. And then I ground to a halt.
A couple of reasons:
Firstly, I realised I’d hit a point in the story where I was able to reuse many scenes from my original draft. Which, is a Nanowrimo no-no. Admittedly I had to make changes to the scenes, including transforming them from third person to first, but still, they are previously written work.
Regardless of this, I faced another dilemma with transplanting scenes – I wasn’t sure if this was a good thing or not. I was re-writting for a reason, right? Perhaps I’d lost my way? I needed to take a few days out to get some distance from my writing and review my plotting and character motivation notes.
The second reason was that during this “time-out” my computer got a nasty little virus. I’ve spent the last several days painfully running cleaning scripts, and at the same time I had to do a couple of reformats of another computer.
It’s been 6 days since I’ve written anything.
My goal for Nanowrimo was to do 500-1000 words per day, which equates to 15000-30000 words for the month of November. So technically I already achieved my minimum. But why settle for minimum, when I could strive for maximum?
I have 8 days to get in 8000 words. Can I get my head back in the game and reach 30000?
I’m going to try!
Hope everyone else is hanging in there and I’m looking forward to seeing friends hit their goals 🙂
Oh and … Happy Thanksgiving to all our American friends!
Helen’s favourite genre is historical fiction with a strong romantic element. She also enjoys contemporary romance, chick-lit and YA. She’s not caught up in the spell of fantasy fiction, despite The Faraway Tree series being a strong influence in her childhood.
Helen is currently working on her first book, a Christian young adult novel set between two opposite but equally fascinating places in Australia.
Helen is a strange combination of fiction editor and web strategist. That’s because she loves fiction and the internet – and analytics! A former business analyst and IT support manager, Helen now spends her time parenting her three children as well as running her editing and web agency businesses. As a book reviewer and fiction editor, her one true love and specialty is Christian romance fiction.