First, I’m overwhelmed with the sheer volume of communication surrounding NaNoWriMo. There’s a non-stop stream of related tweets with the #nanowrimo tag, my inbox is overflowing from forum updates about write-ins and announcements just for the L.A. area, and that’s before I have a chance to swing through the Fantasy forum. People were putting together meet-ups at midnight on October 31st to get to know other local writers and get a jump on the writing treadmill.
I’ve often read and heard that writing is a lonely, solitary business. NaNoWriMo is anything but. Sure, you could not go to the write-ins, never associate yourself with a region, ignore the forums and twitter and focus totally on writing…but sometimes you need that little bit of support, encouragement, or advice. NaNoWriMo more than meets that need and gives you every advantage to hit that goal of 50,000 words.
That’s probably the most surprising thing about NaNoWriMo I’ve seen so far. No negativity, everyone’s excited, and nothing seems too crazy to tackle. Add in a dash of self-inflicted discipline, and that novel may yet materialize in 29 more days!
Okay, so how did Day 1 turn out?
Min. Daily Average Word Count: 1,667
Word Count Goal: 2,500
Actual Word Count: 2,814
Daily Word Count Score (words in excess of min daily average): +1,147
Total Word Count Score: 5,171
Chapters complete: 1
The protagonist, Mia, is turning out to be a lot more severe than originally planned (at least, she got into a fight in the first chapter, which definitely was not on the radar when I sat down yesterday morning to start writing).
Feeling a bit confident, since I’m a little ahead of the game, and I have the next handful of chapters roughed out. The pain will hit when I get into act two and I’m flying a little more blind.
Now on to chapter two…