Let me tell you something...

...My first drafts include an awful lot of telling, and not a lot of showing. My first drafts are generally a lot shorter than they should be. My first drafts are rubbish. But you know what, that's ok. My subsequent drafts (for there will be many) will be rewritten so the telling becomes showing. This will add words. And make everything better. There are some things I can do quite well. I'm ok at dialogue (which is a skill, and I'm very lucky to have it). I've given my characters awesome names. I think I have an interesting story. I have some really bad habits. I change tenses as often as I change my socks and it is a massive struggle to keep a handle on it. I haven't found my main character's voice yet, so that keeps switching too. I'll be honest, that is really annoying me even though I know that I've got to write through it to find it...anyway, I'm ahead on my words for today. I want to hit 10,000 by the end of the day. I also want to make salted caramel brownies, which I'm going to do in a minute. So, writing and brownies. Good day? I hope so.

Day two in the NaNoWriMo house...

Right, I'm going to keep this quite short and sweet because I have other words I need to type, however, I thought it would be nice to check in and keep you up to date with how my NaNo is going. So I started yesterday, which was good on words (3668) and baaaad on quality. But I did set some scenes that will be interesting to revise, and learnt some things about my world, which was good. There was a fair bit of AND THEN THIS HAPPENS and THEN SOMETHING ELSE HAPPENS HERE BUT I'M NOT SURE WHAT EXACTLY which serves the purpose of shifting the story on whilst reminding myself of what I was thinking at the time. Today has been much better. I've written a good fight scene and am now up to 5008 words, which is a tenth of the way through! I'm aiming for 6000 by the end of today. Actually, I'm aiming for 6000 before I get in the shower...I definitely think that this NaNo is aided and abetted by the fact that I'm not really drinking, and that I'm still not back at work full time. Oh, and the fact that I have a plan and I know some bits and pieces about my characters. That is definitely helping. Fingers crossed I'll plough ahead with my word count. I'm aiming for a completed narrative by the end of November, like a giant 50,000 word plan which I can print and draw all over and then re-type from a nice blank page. Because this year, NaNo is all about the re-write. November is a vehicle, and no matter how difficult it seems, I know it is just the start of the hard work. How exciting!