I find it so much harder to blog when I have nothing to write about.
Last week, if I'd written this on Friday when I'd intended to, I probably would have had a bit more to say. As is typical for me during NaNoWriMo, I wrote well for the first few days, and then got extremely behind. But I wrote 9,000 words in three days, so now I'm all caught up again. I think I have tennis elbow, though (a pre-existing injury only exacerbated by letting myself get so far behind).
Largely due to this, I think, the lessons I learned during Boot Camp have somewhat fallen by the way side. Most of the last few days have been taken up by word sprints (where you set a timer and write as many words as you can until it goes off), which I'm somewhat excited to say yield about 1000 words every fifteen minutes. This doesn't exactly lead itself to quality writing, or to considering your work as you create it, something I think is necessary to implement the lessons I only just learned from Boot Camp.
It wasn't a waste of time, though - far from it. I've noticed that I'm far more able to consider what should be happening, and how a particular scene should be going, even if it isn't going quite as planned. I'm realising my mistakes and making notes about how I should fix them.
One of the things I need to fix, again an issue caused by word sprints, is that most of my scenes are far too long. I'm 20, 000 words in, and I'm only just starting the third scene - a scene that should probably have ended 5000 words ago. I also need to move some scenes around.
I feel like, in some ways, that NaNoWriMo is like writing an extended outline of the planning you did beforehand. I'm getting the bones of the story down on paper, but I'm also figuring out all the things I need to plan that I hadn't planned before - like the rules of magic in my universe, for example (kind of a biggie).
On the plus side, though, I'm really enjoying the story. The characters are fun, and I've had some breakthroughs about other characters I need to introduce. I'm also not giving myself the chance to over-analyse anything, which is usually while I write so slowly. Also, although I haven't read over much of what I've read (mostly out of fear of how terrible a writer I am), most of what I've caught sight of my accident hasn't been half-bad, writing wise.
The other bonus of doing NaNoWriMo is the social side. I'm really active in the meet-up groups, and it's great to meet so many new people, especially fellow writers. And, despite the chatter that goes on, I'm still up to date on my word count, so yay, basically.
I was about to say that another bonus is that I've been maintaining a social life, but then I realised that actually, I haven't, really. I went out briefly on the weekend with non-writers (although it turned out that one of them had done NaNoWriMo in the past, so we ended up talking about that), and other than that I've left the house to go to meet-up groups or to go out and write. Or to go to work, but I write for a living too, so not sure if that really counts. So that's a bit of a fail.
But who cares? I've got 20,000 words.
