I'm not really doing anything "bad" according to the NaNoWriMo rules. The point is word count, by any means necessary short of typing out "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" over and over like Nicholson did in The Shining. But, I've now resorted to what I feel are dirty tricks to keep myself at a decent pace (which is to say, two days worth of work behind).
In those spaces I feel stuck, I've resorted to putting things in brackets, like [Okay, right here is where I wanted to put the scene where the aliens stop the pickup truck, beam three of the four people on board, leaving the forth one who, for some reason, is able to resist the paralyzation beam and yadda yadda yadda.] (No, that appears nowhere in my "novel," but you get the point.)
But, tonight it was even worse. Rather than hammer out the scene I was working on, I just cobbled a transition into another scene I had planned that wasn't supposed to happen for at least one more chapter. Well, the one upside is that while I know I'm going to end up with something that's certainly not going to be confused with Proust, I know I'm making it good enough to have decent material that I can sift through later. Maybe pare down to something short that I can submit somewhere. Personally, I see nothing wrong with the thought of writing a "novella" as opposed to a novel, but if anything, I'd rather see a good 5,000 word submittable short story come out of this than a novel/novella that stands a snowball's chance of seeing the light of day.
I was sort of hoping to have a marathon session tomorrow, but I've been letting stuff slide around here. I made a half-assed attempt at housework when I got home just so I could scribble down what I got down tonight.
Since there isn't a counter anymore, I have to say that I'm at 15,064/50,000 words, or 30% toward completion.
In those spaces I feel stuck, I've resorted to putting things in brackets, like [Okay, right here is where I wanted to put the scene where the aliens stop the pickup truck, beam three of the four people on board, leaving the forth one who, for some reason, is able to resist the paralyzation beam and yadda yadda yadda.] (No, that appears nowhere in my "novel," but you get the point.)
But, tonight it was even worse. Rather than hammer out the scene I was working on, I just cobbled a transition into another scene I had planned that wasn't supposed to happen for at least one more chapter. Well, the one upside is that while I know I'm going to end up with something that's certainly not going to be confused with Proust, I know I'm making it good enough to have decent material that I can sift through later. Maybe pare down to something short that I can submit somewhere. Personally, I see nothing wrong with the thought of writing a "novella" as opposed to a novel, but if anything, I'd rather see a good 5,000 word submittable short story come out of this than a novel/novella that stands a snowball's chance of seeing the light of day.
I was sort of hoping to have a marathon session tomorrow, but I've been letting stuff slide around here. I made a half-assed attempt at housework when I got home just so I could scribble down what I got down tonight.
Since there isn't a counter anymore, I have to say that I'm at 15,064/50,000 words, or 30% toward completion.
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