NaNoWriMo Day Eight

I just hit 23,000 words this afternoon. I'm halfway through the minimum word count of 50,000 with less than a third of the month gone. That's pretty good.

Now some of that is a cheat. Because it's a sequel to a horror movie, I'm recapping the events of the movies. This gives me a chance to patch some plotholes, and the film I picked has very large plotholes. The recent commentary track of the movie features the cast and director pointing out story weaknesses, and I wanted to clean those up in this project. I also wanted to of course build on the movie's story and follow the progress of one of the movie's leads. That's where the story idea came from: Ok, that's pretty horrible, but what happened the next day. The movie came out 27 years ago. What happened since then? That's how I got here, 23,000 words into a novel. I'm actually writing an f'ing novel. Golly.

You can follow me or make me a buddy at the November project website. I'm listed as heygregory.

NaNoWriMo Day One

After weeks of casual research and drafts of notes, I started my novel experiment today. To get 50,000 words in 30 days, I figured I'd need to hit roughly 1,700 words a day. That's what I had in mind as I wrote. When I was done with my first pass at the first chapter, I had right under 3,000.

It took some doing to get started, and that was after I found the right "camera angle" for the first scene. The first few paragraphs were slow to form, and I moved some sentences around. My initial first sentence moved to the third paragraph, and that felt liberating. it gave me a style direction to follow. I probably overdid the style, but it created sentence fragments, and I realized at the conclusion of the first pass that I could flesh those out and probably add 15% more words to my daily count.

That's a good start, I think.