NaNo Day 1

So, November is National Novel Writing Month, a self-competition where you’re challenged to write 50,000 words of a novel in a single month.  I usually try to participate in this every year, but the last few work has gotten in the way.  This year, however, I’ve got a great story that I’m really ready to write, my work load has slacked off a bit, giving me some actual free time to write in, and things are looking good for me to get the whole 50k this year.

So, the book I’m writing this year is a complete rewrite of Spires of Infinity.  Spires had a lot of problems.  I mean a LOT of problems.  As I said in a previous blog post, I took a look back at it, and now that I’m distanced from it by a few years, I could see all of the things that were wrong, and exactly what I needed to do to fix it.  I basically kept the first one page chapter, and dumped all the rest.  I’m basically rewriting the entire thing from scratch, because very little of the old text is really usuable in the new version of the story.  Many characters and storylines have been cut completely, giving me a lot more room to better develop the personalities, backstories, and motivations of the characters I’m keeping.  A lot of the basic plot structure is the same, but this will be a very, very different book in the end.

So, I already had 26,154 words of this rewrite written before NaNo started.  Today I ended up with 32,598, for a first day total of 6444 words written.  The daily goal for NaNo is 1667 words per day to reach the 50k by the end of the month, so I am off to a great start.  I am focused more on writing than I am on formatting, spell-checking, and posting what I’ve written on my website at the moment, but I do expect to start posting some chapters of the first draft of this rewrite sometime this month if anyone cares to read my terrible first draft.  My first drafts usually lack a lot of descriptive elements, are usually chalk full of continuity errors, and lacking a bit in character personality and distinction.  Those are things I usually add in later during the editing process.  I usually use my first draft to get the basic framework of the story put together so I have something to tinker and work with throughout the rest of my editing process.  So, in short, if I do post chapters and you do read them, they’re probably not going to be very good or very well written, because I haven’t polished them up yet.

Anyway, I’ve got big plans for day two.  A nice big cluster of action scenes.  Those usually go by pretty fast and easy for me, so I should hopefully be able to at least match today’s word count.