NaNoWriMo day one
My first day spent working on my novel went better and worse than I could have imagined. On the positive side I’ve written more than 4000 words. On the negative side the beginning of my story seems hopelessly irrelevant and I’m already wondering if I should go in a different direction than I originally planned.
I had originally intended to start writing at midnight this morning, but last night the anticipation made the hours crawl so slowly that I was overcome with sleep about 11:30 p.m. I thought I might wake up about 2 or 3 a.m. and start writing, but slept soundly until past 8 a.m. Two waffles and two cups of coffee got me going for the morning, and I spent an hour with my laptop in the sunroom, just typing, trying not to edit as I went. Of course I did edit more than maybe I should have, but it’s hard to break a lifetime habit as a good speller. By the time an hour had passed I had typed 1467 words, just 200 shy of the 1667 per day that will get me to 50,000 by the end of November. I was astonished. Can it be that easy? The answer is “no” of course. The rambling, the sidetracking, the wondering how to describe what I see in my brain and how to make it believeable is more time-consuming than the actual typing. I can feel the neurons forming new paths in my brain already.