Three days gone and I have 6787 words. 10% of the way there!

Had a horrible day playing basketball yesterday but came home and soaked the tired muscles. One and a half years in Japan not doing any running sports and as soon as I get back to Australia it’s the same old problems I had when I left. Oh how I miss Japan’s onsens.

After dinner I sat down to start the day’s write session. Somehow managed a couple of thousand words and without noticing it I’d hit the 5000 word milestone. In fact I’d completely leapfrogged it. No time to rest on that shallow bed of laurels however. I’m off to recharge my caffeine levels, my body is dangerously low after going without yesterday. On a Sunday! Crazy I know.

Quick recap on my first three days of NaNo (can’t be bothered typing the whole thing anymore).

Day 1: Did my first day ever of sitting down seriously to write a novel…at home. It was horrible, with my mum going about the house cleaning in the background and sometimes not the background, hassling me, asking me questions, complaining about my diet, etc.

To make things worse I was really struggling to write. One of the scenes that I imagined years back being the trigger for events was so hard to write and seem interesting on paper. The scene was far too slow and boring I thought. And I have to go through thirty days of this torture? I want to quit already. Maybe I’m not cut out to be a writer after all. Doubt already and it’s only day one!

Day 2: Chapter 2 was even worse. I slogged through it and by the time I was finally done I was happy just to be done with it. Save and close.

Sometime during the day I figured I was missing a prologue so I went back to type in a punchy action scene. This was great as it reenergized my writing, reminding me of what was good about this story, giving me hope.

Later, when I went to update my word count for the day I discovered the bottom paragraphs of Chapter 2 which I’d struggled with were missing. Gone. No amount of trying to go back and tracking changes could turn up my deleted words. I’d already saved over the complete chapter with the one in which I must have accidently deleted those words. That’s what I hate about typing with a mouse pad on a laptop, when you accidently touch it and move the cursor around, sometimes highlighting and then replacing whole chunks of text with a single letter.

After much cursing, I bit the bullet and re-typed those hated couple hundred of words. The second time round they did seem less corny and I even think I added in some improved ideas, so I the end I’m happier. I guess I can look forward to that in the second draft. Overall a good result but I’d really rather not have to try to recreate any lost words again.

Day 3: Wrote a chunk of words, getting my character to where I want her to be. I really am trying to avoid travelogue as I hate reading it. Lack of detailed planning means that I was happy to discover a character interaction that both fills in some plot holes and was an actual pleasure to write. Need more of this.

What sort of crazy word is that? It’s an acronym for National Novel Writing Month, that month being November. Of the history I don’t know much about it but it seems that by ‘National’ it refers to USA. It’s certainly a bit more global than that which is fortunate for me.

It’s a little known acronym but fortunately it’s very easy to explain to those not in the know. 50,000 words in 30 days. One novel in one month. That’s the goal and it begins tomorrow.

I stumbled across it a couple of years ago at Stanton Library in North Sydney, wondering what in the world is that nonsensical word with the jumble of upper and lower case letters? At the time I was not ready to tackle such a lofty challenge. Now it seems I am.

I had originally planned on taking the three months of the Japanese winter, mid-December through to mid-March, to write my first novel but upon arriving home in Sydney this October, somewhere, I can’t remember where, I saw that funny word NaNiWriMo. I thought to myself, that’s bad timing, I’m writing my novel in December not November.

Situations change and I’m no longer planning on spending three months snowboarding Japan’s wondrous snow. Bad timing becomes good timing and tomorrow I’m going to start writing my first novel.

There’s a lot of challenges to tackle and there’s plenty of reasons why I should not be writing a novel to begin with. But it’s November. It’s Novel Writing Month. And I’m the kind of guy who goes with the flow on these sorts of things.

Now I need to get back to preparing my plot.

Wish me luck