NaNoWriMo: Day 2

NaNoWriMo is upon us once more. Writers everywhere are desperately scribbling words however they can, trying and praying that they reach the 50k word goal by midnight on November 30^th. Parents go ignored, spouses go neglected, children are left to turn into feral Lord of the Flies style wild children, hamsters escape and hide under the fridge.

Me though... I’m somehow not neglecting my life. It’s already two days in and I’m at over 6,000 words. I’ve been spending quality time with my family, working full time and I even did a little bit of shopping today now that my money situation has been sorted out by the nice people at the Job Centre. I’m as shocked as you. I work all day and still manage to write roughly 3000 words a day, give or take. The night is still young too which means that this word-count may go up even more by the time you read this. I can’t figure out how I’m managing this. Although that may have a little something to do with the fact that my narrator has become a character in his own right.

Yup that’s right. I have a narrator that is not omniscient and is now a character. He has no name, a paranoid, bonkers personality and a tendency to go wildly off topic. I also struggle to get him to describe anything happening properly. Oh and let’s not mention the fact that there are apparently two people in his brain, him and someone called Cecil. I’m only halfway through the first chapter! I’m getting the feeling that this novel may actually kill me if I ever finish it and get to the stage of editing.

I think one of the biggest influences in my success so far is the CD I got sent by a fellow NaNo-er (I would include a link to the forum thread this spawns from here but the site is down AGAIN). It’s full of a variety of music and most of it is really inspirational. I pop it on as I start writing and it really helps me to get into the flow. It’s about an hour long and once I reach the end I know that I’ve finished an hour of writing, (with a few distractions). If I’m still in the writing zone, which I usually am I’ll pop on my own playlist that I plan to burn onto some blank CDs in the next few days to send off. That’s just over an hour long as well so I know that once it’s finished I’ve been writing for at least an hour (again with a few distractions). Within the next couple of weeks I should hopefully have another two CDs with lots of interesting music to inspire my writing.

I had planned to do an inspiration filled post tonight about how I love the NaNo spirit at the minute but I’m just too tired. Personal problems made sleep an issue last night and it’s almost my bedtime now so I’m flagging a bit. Before I go though I thought I’d share a big bloggy decision with you all.

As of Sunday I will have a regular update schedule. Well, sort of. On Sundays I will be doing my usual RoW80 post as I try to fulfil more of my goals there. On Wednesdays I’ll be making posts specifically about how I’m finding NaNo and some of the tricks I’m employing to get through it all; including a day of my schedule, inspired by this series of blogs. Any other day is fair game with a possible post about basic writer related things and links to other blogs and articles that I’ve found very interesting.

Keep Writing!