The First Wondrous Days of NaNo

Yes, we are five days into NaNo. I'm mostly posting snippets and such over on my NaNoblog from last year, so you can find what I'm doing there.

I'm doing well. I've just crossed the 54,000 word line and I'm a little over half way through the novel.

As I often do with NaNo, I'm trying an experiment, and I think it's working better than I could have hoped. When I outline I usually give each phase of the outline a word count number that will help me make certain that I reach the proper length for the type of book I'm writing. In this case I was aiming at a 90k novel. I gave myself 450 words per phase, and 202 phases, which would have put me just a little over what I wanted.

But I rarely make the exact count on each phase. Usually a few go over, and some go under. This time, though, I'm making myself do at least 450 per section. Nothing under. I'm doing it by adding... yes... far more detail.

And it's working. I think this is working very well. I can't be sure yet. It may be that my First Person POV MC is spending way too much time inside her head, but I think overall this might be exactly the kind of change that I've needed to make. It's forcing me to add in the things that I usually skimp on in the first draft, and I really can't say that it's slowing me down any -- not when I can do 50k in 4 days.

So we'll see. It might be a fluke. It might be that this isn't working at all and I'm just having far too much fun to tell. I'm not going to back to read it, though I did check out the opening. It was rough, but better than usual, I thought.

But that's all my news for the moment. I'm doing great. A few more days and I'll drop back to a more normal madness, rather than the 10k a day I have been doing. I'm going to have fun while I can, though.