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Let’s not mince words.  Week two was a disaster.

If you remember my last post, I lamented about how I was in a bad position because I essentially had my main character and had no conflict whatsoever.  In fact, her life at that point looked about as good as it was going to get.  Sure, a little tragedy sprinkled here and there, but the net result was that she was moving in a wonderfully positive direction.  Great to hear about such things in real life, but it does not make for good writing.  I was stuck and my mind took a break and pondered it out.

My week looked like this.  Monday I had the cable guy doing their install that day which ended up waking Audrey up, my main writing slot.  Highly distracted that night because, hey, fast internet had returned.

Tuesday was rough.  I spent the day getting a PC ready for my in-laws, which was fine.  I even got over 700 words written during some down time during the day.  I wanted to write some that night after everyone had gotten to bed, my usual M.O.  Unfortunately, we hit a deer on the way home and caused a good deal of damage to the front end of the Highlander.  The deer were thick that night and I had no fewer than three sudden brakes to prevent even more damage.  I had the intention of writing that night, but I was an emotional wreck.  I tried to write, but my mind just didn’t get into that frame of mind.

Wednesday was “get the car fixed” day.  By this time, the problems of what I was writing were manifest, with no real solutions.  I didn’t feel like I could just introduce any old problem and run with it.  It needed to seem real to me and nothing was quite working.  I was getting closer though and being at that time just a day and a half behind, decided maybe really thinking out the problems would help.

Thursday was a lost day.  Worry reared it’s ugly head.

Friday it occurred to me where the conflict should occur and I began to work toward that result.  I did about a half a day’s work between family and car obligations.

Yesterday I hit my quota and started down the right path with the continuation started the day before which led to better success today.  I have a bona-fide conflict, one that I’m actually pretty happy working with.  Sub-plots are churning and things are looking up.  Currently, I’m about six thousand words off pace, but that’s doable.  That’s something I can catch up over a week if I really concentrate and bear down.

What I was surprised is that the internal editor didn’t cause too much problem.  One could argue that it was the editor that stopped me and got me thinking about my plot, and you might be right.  But the point is that it stopped me because I had no viable conflict and not that it was telling me that my writing sucks and similar things.

And I could be dinged for not blogging about these struggles, but it was a bit depressing to think that my blog posts would mostly say things like “zero words again, not sure what’s going on”.  It tends to take whatever wind out of your sails, at least it would for me.

Back at work though, steadily cranking out the words.  I’ll post more word count updates soon.

Word count today: 1731

Word count total: 13414

Today was not filled with great writing. It was servicable. These were words that filled the gap, words that will likely end up being on the chopping block come revision. Nothing here that was that impressive to write about. That’s the way it goes sometimes and days like this should be expected from time to time.

What I can say that was nice about this was the writing came quickly. I didn’t censor myself much here and feel pretty good about cranking out over 1700 words in a little over an hour. I’ve had better hours, both in sheer numbers and in quality, but it’s nice to get some exposition that was stuck in my head out to make way for better writing.

Still on pace. Not an explosion of words here, but still ahead of the curve. Next week is the trecherous week two. Wish me luck.

Word count today:  2162

Word count total:  9831

This was strange.  I can honestly say that before I started typing today, there was nothing I was dreading worse than writing my NaNo novel.  It wasn’t just the writing itself as I was just a bit sad today anyway.  The sadness was caused by personal realizations that I don’t really relish.  Indeed, it was something of a resignation of certain facts that made my mood miserable.  I’m not going to get into these facts as they pertain to very personal beliefs, but you can rest assured that it is nothing involving my marriage, my kids, my dog, house or family.  All of that is good.  Let’s just say things out of my control made me sad and leave it at that.

However, once I sat down and told myself to write…well, it was good.  Really good.  Good enough that I whipped up over two thousand words in a fairly short space of time.  Dialogue does that for me for some reason.  I’m comfortable with it.  Description is harder and trying to avoid awful exposition is the most difficult for me.  But like I said yesterday, I knew this was going to be a mostly dialogue day and it worked well for me.  Some surprising things happened which is always good.

Tomorrow we’ll see if the flow continues.  I want to get in a good chunk of words because I really do not know what Sunday is going to hold for me at all.  Good news on this is that I’m nearly at 10,000 words and not only that, I’m a full day ahead of schedule.  My current NaNo stats have me hitting the goal right now on November 26th.  Man, that would be a first.

My attitude so far is good, but I can feel the seeds of doubt starting to creep in.  The second week is rough, people.  That’s when the internal editor, who has been so patient for one week, wants to step in and step on your story letting you know just how bad it is.  The challenge is to tell the internal editor to shut its pie hole until revision, which sounds easier than it is.  You’ll know if I falter.

Word count today: 1865
Word count total: 5909

Difficult. That is one of the words I can use for my work today. I’m going to expound on this a bit more tomorrow, but I’m already experiencing one rough patch of doubts. This usually happens though and isn’t completely unexpected.

Today was also a day where the writing was broken into two parts. One batch in the early afternoon and the other in the evening. I don’t normally like this, but today was a bit of an abberation. Good news is that I came up with what I thought might be a funny short story, so the creative juices are flowing.

For now though, I’m just really tired and looking forward to getting a number of things done tomorrow. Good news is that I am 900 words ahead of my targets. In previous years, I would sprint out to a huge lead but then stall pretty hard. This year has been steady. So far, so good.

With any luck, this is just a pre-post to my actual work I hope to do tonight. You see, things sometimes don’t quite work out the way you want and work suffers because of it.

Words done so far today: 1817
Words total: 4044

Yeah…I know. Sad thing is that I don’t really have a good excuse for this. The day itself started a bit ominously when in the event of trying to be on top of things today, I made several miscalculations.

First of all, I misinterpreted where Melanie and I need to vote today. I thought that because we haven’t had residency at our new place long enough, we wouldn’t be able to vote in the new place. Turns out residency requirements are a mere ten days, so I was wrong. Regardless, we went up to Grantsburg today to vote, only to find out we couldn’t vote in Grantsburg as we were not on their voter rolls either. Not a huge deal, but I have no idea how busy the line is going to be after people are off of work.

My second mistake was leaving my laptop back at our house. Normally, I could get by but this was also a day I needed to make some changes online and all of the information I needed was on my laptop. Over an hour was blown simply driving back, picking up my laptop back and then heading back to Grantsburg. On a very slightly positive note, I did get to put the garbage can away. One less thing to do when we get home.

The third thing is entirely me. I don’t know what it is, but when I’m at my in-law’s house, I just can’t seem to sit down and write. I can cruise the internet and read about a bunch of stuff which is of little importance on my laptop, but sitting my butt down during a block of free time to knock out some fiction is a herculean task. It’s not as if I’m not motivated or that I’m stuck on where I want the story to go. Not at all. But maybe it’s just the aura. And it’s something I don’t really understand as it’s about as a welcoming environment as you could possibly want, yet my fiction writing struggles here. A 500+ word blog post, no problem. Anything resembling a story, multiple levels of failure.

This is hopefully corrected tonight. I asked Melanie if I could concentrate on writing tonight, especially once Audrey goes to sleep, and she was quite encouraging. That’s why I really hope to update this tonight with a new number and further progress on NaNoWriMo. Any progress will be updated with my iPhone and two fingers, so don’t expect as long of a treatise as this post written on a laptop with both hands.

Lastly, my main goal with NaNo this year is to be constant and steady, each day a path of progress towards the development of a story. I know personally that I can do a sprint, and in fact when prodded, I can be absolutely prodigious in sheer word output. No, instead of being a sprint runner, I want to be the writing equivalent of a marathon runner. Steady, committed, and able to crank out a longer work in a not unreasonable frame of time.

As always, encouragement and gentle prodding is welcome.

UPDATED: I did manage to get some writing in today, thanks in part to my understanding wife. Totals at the top are now current. Still on track.