Cheated

Tonight, for the first time, I cheated on NaNo. I didn't last year. Last year I wrote no matter what. Even when my cat was hospitalized and they told me he was very weak from loss of blood and would probably die. I wrote my quota the three nights he was in, and I wrote my quota when I'd brought him home and had to give him pills several times a day and try to get him to eat.

I even made my quota the day I picked him up and got a look at the bill.

But I received some bad news tonight, at about my 1400th word, and I was too upset for awhile to think about my story. If I hadn't put off writing until evening, and writing at a slow pace in between doing other things, I would already have made my total when I found out.

Part of the trouble was that I didn't find anything out. I found out there was something bad, but that I couldn't be told what it was because it had been told in confidence to the person who told me. Who didn't tell me. He just told me that there was something to tell and it wasn't good.

Jesus. You cannot tell me something like that and expect me to take it well.

So I cried a little, imagining horrible things. Then I saw the clock ticking away and looked at the half-filled page and had no desire to write anything about my story.

So I hit "enter" a few times and started venting about what had just happened. It was in my story's document, and it is writing. It's certainly colorful and expressive. Technically, maybe it isn't cheating and if it is, I'm only cheating myself.

But I don't want to cheat myself. I'm going back to the story, even if it is late, and try to write a little more that will count towards yesterday's total.

Halfway Mark

Halfway point and all is well. Almost 25,000 words (I’m 100 short). Close enough to halfway to say I’m halfway. Of course, I’m padding a bit, but my pre-NaNo efforts to work out the plot and structure seem to be paying off. I’m trying to show instead of tell and set up situations that move from simple to complex and reach a crisis and resolution. Since it’s a romance, not a thriller, I don’t know if there’s going to be a huge crisis at the end, or rather that the crisis will seem big enough. There’s tragedy, but I don’t know if that’s a crisis.

My mood goes up and down. Sometimes it’s a struggle and I don’t make my daily quota. I had a good night tonight. I went into it a few hundred shy of 22,000 and didn’t figure I’d make it halfway. But I thought up this good scene, kind of humorous, not rolling in the aisles funny. But it does help reveal the characters and shows them moving closer together, in spite of the difficulties I’ve given the poor guy.

I’ve been dealing with a funny sort of guilt and sorrow. I knew going into the story that a major character was going to die near the end of the book, and I feel like a murderer, especially as I’m getting to know him better and better. I feel like an executioner, to be more precise.

To get back to the scene I wrote tonight, it illustrates the best part of NaNo. When you can really get into the flow it’s like running downhill with a stiff wind at your back and daily word quotas are a breeze. I didn’t even have an inkling earlier that it was going to spring inside my head, fully formed, like I was watching a movie.

Some days you have to force it. The best way to describe it is that it’s like running away from a mob. You have to keep moving, . You can’t stop to tie your shoe and if you drop something it’s gone. But when you’re running like that, you find reserves of creativity you didn’t know you possessed. It’s like automatic writing, and probably parts are coming from your own life experiences, mixed with the plot you’d already devised for that chapter or scene.