Day One

So, right off the bat I am realizing why they have the whole rule of starting off from scratch. In trying to pick up where I left off on my story from November, I had to read over at least some of what I’ve written. It’s been a long time since I even looked at the thing and I’d forgotten some of the main character’s names, quirks, motivations, etc. I wasn’t stupid enough to allow myself to read through the whole thing (because I knew if I did I’d just want to scrap it and this whole camp thing altogether). But just in the few paragraphs I did read I found so many typos, missed words, even sentences so messed up that I struggled to understand what I’d been trying to say (missed words was by far the biggest issue). I couldn’t help but start to make little corrections as I went through.

Inevitably, I started thinking ‘Well what if I just got rid of this paragraph and re-wrote this section’ or ‘how about I just scrap this scene’. My finger was itching for the delete button like you wouldn’t believe! However, the point of this exercise is to finish the damned story- not to edit it! This is NaNoWriMo- NOT NaNoEdMo, I cannot delete everything and hope to make it out with 100k words- it’s just not gonna happen.

Now, I have signed up for this with the thought that it’ll probably take another 50k words to finish it but I will say that should the story roll along to it’s natural conclusion before that I will more than happily consider myself done. I just don’t think that’s gonna happen. Especially since I don’t even think I’m at the halfway point and I crossed the 50k finish line back in November.

At any rate, due to the minor edits I made as I scrolled through in attempts to reorient myself I only came out with an additional 866 words. Not, needless to say, my goal for the first day. But I am hopeful that I can pump out the words more easily now that I remember what was going through my main characters head when I left off and what needs to happen next in my story arch. Stay tuned.