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Nano – day 14

Project: Untitled Alternate World Novel
New Words: 7,633 (This is over the course of several days since I last posted. About 3600 was written today.)
Current Total Word Count: 20,005
Goal: 50,000+ words

Random Sentence(s): She looked out across the valleys and the other seven peaks. The sky was bright blue and clear and the sun had not yet dipped down behind the mountains. She could feel its warmth on her back.

Notes: Hey! I passed the 20,000 mark. Sweet!
I’m still far behind, and I’ll have to write 5,000 or more words tomorrow to be totally caught up, but I’m feeling good about this whole thing. Using Write or Die today really helped me put out some words despite all the distractions that there are in my house.

[X-posted to my livejournal.]
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Distractions

I’ve fallen rather behind on Nano. And what’s more, instead of writing or even going on one of my walk/runs for marathon training, I spent last night in a frenzy of watching TV episodes on hulu.com. I watched the latest Heroes and Dollhouse episodes, and then discovered that hulu also has some old Buffy episodes, so I went and watched three of those. I have no proper excuse, but I choose to fogive myself for the indiscretion on the premise that I needed a mental break.

Going home to work on Nano doesn’t seem to be effective for me. So I will be going to a coffee shop with no internet access tonight, which will force me to either write or stare at the blank screen for long periods of time. (I have no games on my computer.)

However, there is another distraction that I have to be concerned about. As usual, I’m getting all kinds of ideas for other stories and novels while I’m in the middle of a current creation. Most of these I can just take down a few notes on and set aside. But this idea has sort of hit me upside the head and I really, really want to write even though I know that I really, really have to wait until I finish draft zero of my current Nano novel. (And that’s finish all of draft zero, by the way, not just the 50,000 words for Nano.)

So I will take down the beginnings of notes and ideas, forcibly put them away in a file, and try really, really hard not to think about it too much. Oh, but it’s going to be hard.

[X-posted to my livejournal.]
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Nano – day 8

Project: Untitled Alternate World Novel
New Words: 5,577 (This is over the course of several days since I last posted.)
Current Total Word Count: 12,372
Goal: 50,000+ words

Random Sentence(s): Mitra found the girl was nestled in outcropping further down the mountainside. The snow had melted around her in a circular ring. There were not footsteps in the snow leading into the circle and Mitra could not figure how she had got there. It was a most curious thing.

Notes: I fell behind on Friday and Saturday. The staying up to one a.m. several nights in a row had taken a toll and I was exausted both nights to the point that I didn’t bother writing. This gave me 4400 words for catch up today. I drove down the hill to a local coffee shop to get some work done, because it was far too distracting to try and write at home. I am now only 1,000 words behind, a more reasonable number, which I should be able to catch up in the next day or two.

[X-posted to my livejournal]

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Nano – day 3

Project: Untitled Alternate World Novel
New Words: 2,659  (Sweet tasty words.)
Current Total Word Count: 6,795
Goal: 50,000+ words

Random Sentence(s): Once someone somewhere had told her that there was more space between the particles in an individual atom than there was space between galaxies in the universe, that the world we perceived as solid was actually more empty than full. Sonia knew this intimately.

Notes: I basically wrote to the end of what I’m calling Chapter 3. (i have not written Chapter 2, by the way.) My chapters at this point are determined by the switch from one character’s point of view to another. The “keep writing until the end of the chapter” concept is working well for me. It gives me a defined stopping place, when I can then decide if I want to keep writing. It also keeps my writing longer than I might otherwise, because I cannot stop until that point.