NaNoWriMo Update

My potential guest bloggers have bailed on me... I have to write an actual post! During NaNo and end-of-semester crazy! What??


So, with 11 days remaining in NaNoWriMo, here I am: I've written 29,201 words, meaning I am 2466 words behind at this moment. (I'm going to a write-in later this afternoon, though, so I plan to be caught up-- or even ahead-- before I go to bed tonight.) So far, I'm averaging 1537 words per day, except that's not really what I'm doing-- I've had three different days that were 6000+ words, and other days when I wrote nothing. Those are the breaks.

So here we have a fun little widget, provided by those nice people at the Office of Letters and Light. Red days are my below-word-count days; green ones are my above-word-count days. I'm not clear on what the yellow days are, except that they might be days when the NaNo site didn't see me at all. ??


It says on the site that bold red and green are "reserved for days where you did exceptionally well or monumentally badly." However, I don't see any contrast here, which makes me think either: 1) All of my days have been exceptional/monumental, 2) None of them have been, or 3) I need new glasses.


So much for quantity; how about quality? Well, since they tell me that's not what NaNoWriMo is about, I'm here to say that I just don't care that my novel is absolute rubbish.


Okay, you got me. I care. I care a lot. I want to slap my characters around and order them to start making sense. Right now, my plot has no clear direction, my voice is all over the place, and every single one of my characters has a multiple personality disorder. Not on purpose.


However, I really am enjoying the story. I've tried really hard to make it as unlike my life as possible, within reason (read: I didn't want to do research), so since my MC is in a relationship with a musician, so am I, vicariously. [Not to worry too much; the musician is a lot like my husband. ;)] I'm already mentally thinking about what I want to expand, what I want to delete, and what I want to take outside and sacrifice to the gods of writing as a sort of worst-fruits burnt offering.


And, since Sparquay asked so nicely, here's a tidbit for you. Natasha, my MC, is just at the beginnings of her relationship with Clayton the guitarist. Try not to gag.

Natasha slid past Stephanie & Hillary to get to Clayton, who had been motioning to her. “Was that supposed to be subtle, all that waving?” she asked.

He grinned. “Supposed to be, yeah,” he said. “Here’s your t-shirt.”

Natasha held it up. It was pink, with “Faded Reunion” on the front and “I’m With The Band” on the back. “That’s awesome,” she said. “Do you have one that isn’t pink?”

“Cody!” Clayton said. “I told you she wouldn’t want a pink one!”

Cody rolled his eyes. “Eight hundred thousand women in this city, and you choose the one who doesn’t like pink. I’d have been right about any other woman at this table.”

“That’s true,” Natasha agreed. “Mitzi will wear a pink one with pink ribbons on it and a pink hat to match. And pink shoes.”

“Leave me out of this!” Mitzi ordered.

“Here.” Clayton handed her a key. “That’s to our room; through that door and to the left. The box of shirts is open. You can even change in there if you want.”

“Thanks!” Natasha beamed. She hadn’t meant the t-shirt issue to be a test, but if it had been, Clayton would have passed and gotten extra credit.


And another one, after the pink shirt has been exchanged for a yellow one that Natasha likes better:

Natasha pulled the t-shirt on and looked in a mirror. “Everything still where it should be?” she asked.
“Yeah,” Stephanie said. “Come on! I didn’t come out tonight to spend the evening in a smelly dressing room.”

Natasha folded her discarded shirt and laid it on a chair. “Okay, let’s go make sure Clayton isn’t being mobbed by college girls throwing their bras at him.”

“Another nice image. You’re full of those tonight.”

The girls returned to the table to find that Mitzi had ordered another round of drinks for everyone. “I thought you might need to loosen up,” she grinned at Natasha.

“I don’t think I can get much looser,” Natasha replied. “I just changed my clothes in a men’s dressing room, for goodness’ sake.”

“And you’ve gone out twice this week.You're dangerously close to having a social life,” Hillary added.

“Three times, if you count Whole Foods,” Mitzi said.

“Why would you count Whole Foods?” Hillary asked.

“Because she went there with Clayton,” Mitzi told her.

“Okay, then, three times it is!” Hillary grinned. “Why didn’t you tell us?”

“I was going to, but I got distracted by the flowers and singing,” Natasha retorted.

“What does the back of the shirt say?” Hillary asked. Natasha turned so that she could see. “'I’m With The Band'. Nice. But the rest of us are with the band, too; didn’t you ask Clayton if we could all have one?”

“No, actually, what I asked him is if he thinks I’m a walking billboard.”

Mitzi chuckled. “Imagine you as a walking billboard. ‘Proofreads on Demand’. ‘Thousands of Words Typed Per Hour’. ‘Donate Now and I Won’t Throw Things at You’.”

Natasha glared at her. “How about, ‘Needs New Best Friend’?”

“That would be a crappy billboard.”

The whole novel is pretty dialogue-heavy, since I need the practise, but it isn't wonderful dialogue. But never mind; it's coming along! I can always fix it in revision, right?