NaNo: The Deceptive Word Count

About the only thing I managed to do over the weekend was to work on my novel. I promised myself I'd write every day, no matter what, and I think yesterday was about as big a challenge to that as I'm likely to encounter. Almost faltered when I found out the NaNo site was down which meant I wouldn't be able to update my word count. But, no, I perservered. And wrote. Wrote a bunch of drivel that I'm frankly ashamed to look back on now but, hey, no delete key in November. I wrote, that's the important thing. I wrote the day it happened. I wrote the day afterwards. And I'll write again now and every day from from now on. Long as it takes until this ride is over. It's been a bumpy start for me but, honestly, I'm not doing to badly.

In terms of word count, I'm up to just under 10k in terms of completely finished "this is going in the book" scenes. Since you're supposed to write about 1.7k a day and we're only five days in, that's not bad. It's actually a bit ahead of the pace.

On the NaNo site, I'm using my "I have word wars to win, dammit" count which includes all the partial scenes and my parenthetical notes and everything in the raw manuscript. Which is just over 21k or so. It's stuff, though, that's going to take me a lot of work to make actually readable since it's writing in ways like this:

She walks up to the desk and (pulls out an object? What's the point of the scene here? Foreshadow this and that. Work on thematic imagery which is what, again?)

Or

A "Says something"
B "Says something back"
A "Replies again."
B "Has a good line which is the whole point of writing this even though I don't know how to fit it in."
A "Says something else to guide me when I go back an fill things in with description."

You get the idea. It's a big sprawling mess and while I'm pulling some o fthe threads closer together, I'm also unravelling a similar amount as I'm adapting things on the fly.

We're getting to the point, though, where I need to sit down and think some things out since I've run through the highly structured material I laid down that first, glorious day. Need to collect my messy notes and make some sense out of them. Redraw the plot to include all the twists and surprises that have cropped up. Re-evaluate, in so many words, where I am and where I'm headed.

Because, if you ask me, I'm pretty well grinding my gears here. I know I'm putting down 5k a day and that sounds pretty impressive, but I can do better. I need to do better if I want to get this thing done. My story is a huge one, after all, and I think I'm going to need 50k just to get out of the first, smallest (except for the closing one) chapter. I'd hoped to have done that, going in, by the end of this first week and I'm sorely behind schedule. Understandable considering everything going on but I'm also, at the moment, out of motivation. Out of energy. Out of inspiration to continue. Because nothing much seems to matter to me right now with all the pain and loss I'm dealing with.

Remember, my goal isn't to get 50k, I know I can do that. My goal is to come out of this with a complete, finished first draft of an awesome book. Maybe one that's only going to please me but that's all I care about at this point. And to get there, realistically, I think we're talking 150~200k at least. Last year I wrote more than 50k in a week, in five days. And I think I'm just going to have to try and do that again once I regroup and renew myself. And once I find my story again.