Thanksgiving and Nanowrimo
Update 25 22-28 November 2021
Been a hell of a week!
My desk chair fully died… I had to do all of my writing at the kitchen table while trying not to be in the way for Thanksgiving dinner. (We make pies and certain dishes earlier in the weeks to get them ready).
But holidays aside I still pushed for my word goals and still moved forward. And I even had time for other fun and games. (In other words, as I write this, I feel like I could have put aside even more time for writing and now I’m battling a LOT of guilt. But hey, that’s the eternal struggle).
Word Goals
First off, I want to comment that my computer updated and decided to change a few things about WORD. The screen looks different, and I hate when my screen looks different. But I will ignore that and got on with the reason for this blog. Accounting for my writing goals and trying to showcase my process.
I managed a 10,048-word week! Fantastic. I’m less than 6000 from the 50k goal for nanowrimo, but hey still going strong with holidays, podcast, work, and illness. I knocked out three chapters and an Interlude. The manuscript sits at 108,047 words, and is probably just past the halfway point. I need to get my efforts up a little higher.
Minor Setback
I did have a minor setback that cost me almost two hours of write time though. I reached a point where I thought I had forgotten a plot detail… and I kind of did… and I also realized that I outlined seven chapters to happen over about 2-4 hours of time. Except that I needed several days to go by before all of those events could happen. I ended up spending my Thanksgiving morning re-outlining all seven chapters to happen in an alternate order and to account for days going by in the first couple chapters before getting on track for all the events at the end of the section.
It actually went a lot smoother than I expected and I was quite pleased with my answers to the problem. I mean, my writing might all fail, but I’m still happy with how it looks right now.
The Story
I have all of my storylines together now. And I have them tired of reacting against everything. They want to be pro-active and fight back. So, we have a large set piece of several battles and characters resolving their goals, and then we have a unified story where the “heroes” are driving their own story.
These next few chapters jump through a bunch of pov shifts where I get to explore the goals and mind sets of many of the secondary characters. Motivations have been hinted at, or filtered through only a handful of POVs up to this point. Now we’ll get the inner truths of a lot of the characters, and then we’ll unleash our heroes back against the many, many villains in this world.
Just talking about it has me excited to write this morning. So I might as well finish this blog up and get back to it.
Well Wishes
I hope that everyone had an amazing holiday. Full of family and food. Mine was filled with two dinners and two groups of family as I had an early dinner and then a late one. I will admit I couldn’t eat during the second one, but it was good to see family.
Though I think someone slipped me a little cold. As I have a scratchy throat and a headache this morning to add to my normal problems. Sucks. But it might also be all the damp and cold as well. It is what it is.
This morning I woke to a light layer of snow on the ground… I both love and hate the snow. I think I will be quite happy to not see any snow for this winter, or ever again for that matter. I might be past my ability to handle it. And that makes me sad.
OK, thank you again for reading and I hope this finds you all well.
