NaNoWriMo 2014 so far

I never seem to blog in November, do I? Funny how that works; I know a ton of folks who do manage to blog during NaNoWriMo, and some do it much more often than others.

Let’s get out of the way what a bunch of you are probably wondering: I’m at 145,400 words right now. Cool? Cool.

This year’s NaNo has been much different than any of my past years. This year is my (lucky?) 13th of participating in NaNoWriMo. Every year has presented its challenges to overcome and its achievements to unlock. This year was no exception. I got NaNo 2014 off to a fun start with making the executive decision not to start the month off with a 50k day and in fact wrote “only” 12.5k on the first day and 25k on the first weekend. This resulted in only good things, actually. In the years of a 50k day, I would find myself too exhausted to write any substantial amount for a week afterward. This year, I kept up the pace of over 10k a day for over a week, reaching 50k on day four and 100k on day eight. Coincidentally, day eight was NaNoWriMo’s Double Up Donation Day, and since doubling my donations and total word count were out of the question, I doubled my daily quota up to that point to reach 100k total.

And then I hit the wall.

Remember when I said this year brought its own challenges? Well, one of those challenges is that I wasn’t writing any new novels from scratch of my own creation this year. My first novel (finished at 70k on day six) was the plot chosen by my top Night of Writing Dangerously donor. But this year I decided to do something different. I had no idea what to write after finishing that novel, but doing a rewrite of my alternate worlds novel was lingering in the back of my mind. This is exactly what happened.

You know what? I loved rewriting that novel. Sure, it fell apart at the end because I had to start thinking about the plot and the science in science fiction, but overall I loved writing it. More importantly, I have a draft to work with that’s much less confusing to follow than my first draft, which was exactly what i wanted out of the rewrite.

But then the crash happened. Even though I loved writing the story, the pressure was on to make it, well, less sucky. This led to me writing a little more slowly and agonizing over every word… even if I know full well that word choice agony is at least a third draft problem. It also led to me trying to make the right plot choices the first time, even though there would be many many drafts where many of the plot points would change.

Who cares? I eventually had to tell myself. Just write The End and worry about it later. And that’s what I wound up doing.

Meanwhile I still needed an idea for what to write after the rewrite was over. Some plots need too much reworking on a short timeframe, others didn’t capture my interest at all right now… the list went on and on. Finally I settled on my 2006 Nano novel, a good premise that didn’t work so well now that the Internet is part of everyone’s lives. Come on, we have computers in our pockets! Surely my main character would have just Googled the person she was looking for.

So I started that novel, even winning a word sprint at the Night of Writing Dangerously while working on that novel. And then, after poking at my novel for days while writing a few sentences at a time, I realized something.

This story was boring. Sure, there are lots of things I could make happen in that story, but I just couldn’t bring myself to care enough about the characters or the plot to do so. In fact, the majority of the plot from the first draft had already happened.

It wasn’t just boredom with the story either. Everything else in my life, things I had ignored in November, suddenly looked so much more appealing. My big stack of books to read. My suspended library holds, which end December first and mean more books. My adventures in code and making things and maybe playing with the NaNoWriMo API. (There’s a write API this year. Exciting!) Writing in here. Writing in my paper journal. Wikiwrimo. Not to mention the pressures of real life pushing down on me and needing to be taken care of in the near future.

Part of me still feels bad, though. Even though I’ve already verified and won, actively quitting a story feels like quitting Nano. This is a different feeling than getting nowhere near finished with a story but still writing to the end, like I did last year. This year feels like I’m quitting, despite winning. I’m not sure how to feel about this. I know what I’m capable of and know that my main 200k goal for this year is still possible, but I want to do everything but work on that story.

“Why don’t you work on something new?” you might ask. That’s the problem. I have plenty of very vague ideas that could spark story ideas, along with at least two more Nano novels I’d like to finish or rewrite. But I have no idea what to do with them, what needs to happen… suddenly I find myself wanting a plan instead of taking a vague idea and running with it. Am I becoming a planner? Dare I say it… maybe. I need a month to flesh out some of those ideas before next November. Maybe that’ll be a camp project. That could be fun.

But for now? I’m going to attempt to resume my other life activities and use all this newly learned info to not burn out next year.

P.S. And for those wondering how the Night of Writing Dangerously went… it was amazing. There will be a post for that. And now that I’ve said as much, it’s going to happen.

P.P.S. This post is longer than what I’ve written in the novel today.