I promised to post updates about how NaNo was going, so here I am! I can’t believe it’s only been a single week … I already feel like it’s been ages.
Current WC/CC: 10,999 words / 6 chapters
How It’s Going:
The word goal for today (if I want to stay on the 1667-a-day track) is 13,333. So as you can see, I’m a little over 2k behind. I managed to stay totally on schedule the first few days, but for the past couple days I’ve been letting myself slip behind a little. I know I can catch up, though, and I’m going to try really hard not to fall behind this week.
My main issue is that I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT I AM DOING. Like, really. I had the first couple chapters planned out, but otherwise I’m pretty much making this up as I go. Around day 4 or 5 I started to feel stuck because I’d already reached the end of what I’d planned. … But I just sat down with my outline, planned a few more chapters, and kept going.
I’m also trying as hard as I can not to be a perfectionist. Normally I’m a little nervous about skipping around on the timeline, leaving scenes incomplete, etc. But right now, I need to just get the story out. If I don’t know how to end a scene, I just leave it where it is and move on to something else. If I’m not sure where one storyline is going, I jump to another one and explore it some more.
A beneficial aspect of my story is that there are a lot of characters and subplots, so when I’m bored/stuck with one, I can move on to another. I’m finding it really fun to explore all the different storylines and to just go crazy with it and see where it takes me. It will certainly need a ton of reworking and polishing when it comes to editing, but I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it. It’s the first draft, and it’s supposed to be a mess. That’s what I have to keep telling myself.
An Excerpt From This Week:
“I’ve thought about it, from time to time,” Walker went on pensively, as if he hadn’t heard anything. He shook the water droplets from his long, bony fingers, then stood up straight with his hands clasped behind his back as he turned to face Matthias again. “It can be difficult to separate the head from the heart, so to speak.”
He watched Matthias over the rim of his glasses as if he anticipated a response.
Matthias stood still, trying to make sense of what the professor had said. “I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean,” he admitted after a short pause.
At that, Cyrus Walker chuckled, and Matthias supplied a nervous smile in answer––he didn’t know what was so funny.
“I suppose that was a confusing choice of words, especially considering my profession,” Walker said. He brushed past Matthias and began to pace around the dissection table once more, watching his feet as he walked. “I’m speaking metaphorically, of course. What I’m saying is, when dissecting a human body, I’m often torn between two halves of myself. There’s the one part—my head—that merely sees the body before me as an inanimate object, a non-living and non-breathing thing.
“But then there’s the other part of me—the heart …” And there he paused for a moment and glanced at the heart that was still lying on the table. “And that part of me,” he continued, “is the part that cringes away, that tells me what I’m doing is wrong somehow. This is a human being, it insists. Someone who was once alive. Someone who once lived, breathed, loved, and hated. Felt pain. Felt joy. It’s all very strange, isn’t it?”
Over all, I’m happy with how things are going so far and I’m looking forward to the next ~3 weeks. It’s going to be a crazy ride with a lot of grave robbery, human dissections, and demonic possession. YAY!
To the rest of you doing NaNo: How’s it going? What are you writing about? I want to hear about your NaNo projects! 🙂
WordFare 
I liked your passage, your book sounds really awesome! Oddly enough, I’m also at chapter 6 today. It always feels like it should take longer to finish those chapters when doing NaNo, even though you spend what feels like forever on each one. I can’t skip around, so I often just make stuff up, telling myself I can just revise it later. I cut a whole lot of my last NaNo novel in revision (around 1500 words in one chapter alone and more than 10000 words total!) and had to rewrite major parts of it after changing some plot lines. When I finish NaNo I’ll probably cut more…. So don’t worry about writing something weird, you might just like it, and even if you don’t you can cut it in two seconds on December 1st. 🙂
I know what you mean about not having time to post book writing updates on a blog. I thought I would have time but only posted my first blog update today. I guess it will be weekends only, then. 😦
Thank you! Haha right? It does feel really weird to write about a chapter a day … the rest of the year, it can take me weeks to get through one chapter. 😛 So during NaNo it’s like “la la la I just started this chapter … wait it’s already 2k words long.” I’m pretty sure I’ve already written more this month than I’ve written in like, the past three months combined, lol. I wish I was this productive all year round!
Ah yes I always do a lot of epic word-cutting after NaNo. There was one year my NaNo ended up being like 160k words long (although I wrote like ~60k of those words after November). I ended up cutting about 70k words from it and that was just from deleting repetitive things, needless descriptions, etc. I think I only cut one scene! So yeah, I’m sure there will be plenty to cut out once I’m done with this draft. It will also need a lot of rearranging and whatnot. But ehh I’ll figure it out!
I’m so bad at posting updates, but I’m trying to get myself to do it more often. I also want to start doing more blog posts that aren’t just writing updates, but I guess that can be a New Year’s resolution for me. 😀