It's Been One Week

The view from here.

One week and 15,299 words later, I have made it through the first bit of NaNoWriMo. There have been good days, better days, and one truly awful one. But no matter how I feel, no matter what I think I'd rather be doing, I have been sitting down and writing.

As I've mentioned before, this project (and the process) is considerably different than any other writing I have done. That is both quite satisfying and quite terrifying. One of the things that's really different is that I'm not writing the story chronologically. That's always been my process in the past. But this time, I have such a richer understanding of the characters, their motivations, and the plot points I'm trying to reach, that I can write the story in a much different way.

While jumping around can get a little tricky, especially when you're nearly 50 pages into a project, this has been a good challenge for me as I think about my Story, the story I'm trying to tell and how I'm telling it.

And all this plotting has in no way taken the joy I got from writing as a pantser. No matter how well I think I know the overall story arc, there is plenty left to discover as I travel from point to point. The Story has to be translated from ideas into actual type-able words. That's where the real joy comes from.

One of the things I love about NaNoWriMo is that my birthday falls exactly a week into it. I get to take the day off for writing (and other fun adventures) and I get to enjoy hearing kind words from friends and from family...and this year, I got some words that were especially meaningful and quite timely...for that I am more grateful than I can say.

In only two days I will retreat to the Oregon coast and wrap myself up in November and create as much of this story as I possibly can, knowing that when I return to reality, there will be a great many other demands on my time and my attention.

I'm very much looking forward to the time away.