Down to NaNo Business

Today, I officially began writing my story for NaNoWriMo. I must say, I am a writing machine. In the span of two hours, I went from 0 words to 2888. And they even make sense. Plus, I think I even have progression working in my favour this time. However, I’m not sure if I introduce a story hook in a compelling way and soon enough in the first scene. I did spend some time tinkering with that. But this is, of course, a rough draft and as Chris Baty, Program Director over at NaNoWriMo said in his pep talk email of November 1st:

“The books we write in November won’t start out like the novels we buy in bookstores. Because the novels we buy in bookstores didn’t start out like bookstore-novels either. Nope. They started out as way-less beautiful, way-more exciting things called first drafts. These are the dinged-up cousins to final drafts, and they’re packed with crazy energy and laughable tangents and embarrassing instances where a main character’s name shifts six times over the course of a single chapter.”

I agree wholeheartedly. And that is why, I am not so worried about whether my story starts off with the biggest bang that it could. Part of the reason why is that I don’t know the whole story yet which means that I don’t know what’s going to be the best way for it to begin. In fact, I’m pretty certain that I’ll be changing the beginning in at least one or two or eight ways before the story is considered ‘ready’.

If I can keep things going, I will be done my 50,000 words in a span of 34 hours (nonconsecetive). Does that sound right? Seems a bit…fast. Then again, I have tossed down over 80,000 words in a month, so 50,000 shouldn’t surprise me.

I pinched this timely photo from Inner Geek.

Now if that NaNoWriMo website wasn’t so amazingly slow that I could actually check in on my NaNo buddies and upload my word count…