November 5

I'm up above 12,000 words now, yippee! Nearly a quarter of the way there. If I were aiming for the normal finish-in-30-days rate of 1,667 words a day, this would put me well into week two. Which probably explains why I'm having some of those week two struggles with defining Where This Is All Going.

So far, I've basically written a lot of character-building short stories about these people I'm getting to know. I hope that someday, in their more edited form, these stories will become chapters. But now I need to start finding some unifying theme, some sense of where it's all going, and I haven't quite discovered that yet. In fact, I'm still playing with the age of the main character, so maybe once I figure that out I'll have a better idea of the plot.

I've been pleasantly surprised by how easy this has all been, so of course I now expect to run up against horrible writer's block at any moment. In No Plot, No Problem Chris Baty suggests bolstering word counts on those more difficult days by including long and wacky dream sequences or giving a character a stutter. I'm hoping I won't need to do anything like that, because I'd like what I write to be useful to the book, in some shape or form. But who knows, in a few days I may start setting everything in mirror land where each item has an opposite that requires oodles of wordy description.

Oh, and a word on logistics. I've created a separate gmail account that I use only for novel-related things, so I don't get caught up in e-mail when I should be writing. I have several Google documents containing possible plot points, character notes, etc., and then a big one titled Novel that contains the obvious. I can access my documents anywhere with an internet connection, and every few days I copy the whole thing and save it as a Word document on our home network for backup. This writing is thrilling stuff, eh? Aaaaand suddenly I've turned Canadian.

Today's Word Count: 2,105/2,000
Total Word Count: 12,122/50,000