NaNoWriMo 2012 - the rest of the story

I had in mind that I would update you every five days during NaNo, but we all see how that turned out. For the record, I had:

8,346 words on day 5 (par 8,333) = ahead
14,362 words on day 10 (par 16,666) = behind
19,083 words on day 15 (par 25,000) = behind
32,238 words on day 20 (par 33,333) = behind
42,311 words on day 25 (par 41,666) = ahead
50,409 words on day 30 (par 50,000) = WINNER!

If you correlate to days of the week, you begin to see a picture of my writing habits this year. NaNo started on a Thursday, and the following Sunday I was caught up. The next full week (November 5-11) I fell further and further behind, and on Sunday I was caught up again. The following week (November 12-18) my word count was again pretty flat during the week, and by Sunday night I was caught up again. Toward the end of the month, though, I wrote pretty consistently and stayed even with par until the end. A picture to show what I mean:

Words written by day:

Monday	3254
Tuesday	2747
Wednesday	8687
Thursday	7415
Friday	5248
Saturday	11429
Sunday	11629

Weekday total: 27,351 words.
Weekend total: 23,058 words. You can see when I did most of my writing. This is not a surprise, though. It's also not a surprise that Tuesday was my low day as that is my busiest day that starts earliest and ends latest.

NaNoWriMo 2012 - day ten

I made up some lost ground today getting around 5,000 words today. I'm still behind, but that was a good chunk of what I needed. We'll see how tomorrow goes. It seems Monday through Wednesday are tough for writing. I'll see if I can change my schedule around a bit and make it not quite so tough.

Today the main character got a name! He also discovered that he's being attacked by some government conspiracy or something. He's not sure yet. I'm not sure yet, either. But at least he has friends. (?!)

NaNoWriMo 2012 - day five

It's day 5 of NaNoWriMo and I'm just on par with 8,346 words of a new story that is going absolutely nowhere as of today. I'm not crazy about the main character, and have put him in a boring situation that I need to somehow drag him out of.

The thing is, I thought it was going pretty good yesterday when I caught up to the words I needed after not writing on Saturday (opting instead to attend a birthday party), and the character got himself a personality. The trouble is, I think I'm going to have to take that personality away from him and give him another one. Yeah, yeah, the obvious schizophrenic route presents itself, but I don't think I like it. I think the personality and the actions he's taking on now are just going to be short-lived is all. A change is coming. That is, if I can motivate myself to push the story ahead more. We'll see.

NaNoWriMo 2012 - day one begins

It is once again November, and NaNoWriMo 2012 has begun. I'm totally pantsing this year - meaning "flying by the seat of my pants." Earlier this morning I activated my NaNo web site account. In doing so it asks you for novel information. I said:

Novel: Through the Rainbow (made this up on the spot)
Genre: Science Fiction (decided as I answered it)
Short Synopsis: Pantsing!

So there you go. I now have a title and a genre, which I did not have yesterday. I have thus far written 80 words, in the form of an email written to myself on a borrowed iPad. An inauspicious start!