NaNoWriMo 2019 Week One Done!

Oh, me, oh, my! Is my word count high?

Well, it’s at least higher than when I started. I hit a wall in figuring out how I wanted to transition between two scenes and convince my young hero that he needed to give up a valuable herb when the financial gain from the herb had the potential to change his life.

That was on Day 4 and I wound up only writing a few hundred (about 240) words leading up to that point in the story. I felt stuck, so I tried to listen to the advice that other NaNo writers had given me, to move on to a different scene, or even a different project, and come back when I had it figured out.

I attempted to move on, I really did, but it was just stuck in the back of my head. So I switched to a different project entirely for Days 5 and 6. I wrote somewhere between 3,000 and 4,000 words in some of my children’s mysteries and storybooks. I hit my 10K word mark. There’s only one problem with that.

My goal for the month isn’t just the 50,000 words, it is to complete the first draft of Project Gravely Mistaken. Which means that no matter how much I wound up writing in my other projects, I had made very little progress towards my real goal for the month.

So I went back to my main project file, and I took out all of the extraneous bits of words (I saved them to a different file, don’t worry!). I was still sitting at 7, 220 words for Project Gravely Mistaken. And the word count goal for Day 7 was 11,669.

My brain just did not want to focus on the story. I kept at it, writing in short little bits, sometimes as small as 9 or 16 words at a time. Eventually, over the course of the day, I became more immersed in the story world and I began to writer larger word blocks.

By the time I went to sleep for Day 7, I had written 4,536 words all in Project Gravely Mistaken, which brings my total to 11,756 words.

Thank goodness! I was really starting to worry because I have tried NaNoWriMo before, and when I fall behind, I tend to lose all motivation to continue with the challenge. This year, however, I decided to make the concerted effort to complete the first draft, and I am trying my best to stick with it.

Even if I have to write in 9 or 16 word chunks, I am going to write this story.

Do let me know in the comments, how is your writing going? I hope you are having a smoother time of it than I am, but please let me know either way!

*Mwah! Love,

Jules