NaNoWriMo Day 7

What's going on?

This week's learning curve has been quite steep. For a start, I learnt that no matter how much I thought I had planned there were still some chasm like holes in my plot. The chronology was a bit out of whack and if we were to do a tension graph there were definitely some parts of the plot where readers would be bordering on snoozing rather than sitting on the edge of their seats (read last weeks NaNo update for confirmation).

Normally at the falling asleep stage I would go back and just do a rewrite. And silly old me, tried to pep up a chapter a little bit on Saturday. The problem was I was really tired (that's a whole other story in itself entitled: The varied adventures of Merlin, the expensively deformed cat) and all I ended up doing is cutting my word count. Gah! Slap head, curl up under duvet and have a nap, which I did.

Today (it's Sunday, am I confusing you with the chronology again) I found another one of those chasms. Keep writing I told myself. It's only a couple of lines, my fingers said and deleted. Doh! My head said.

Another thing that was going on today was that I was hosting the first English write-in. English in that you needed to write in English. There was one Brit, one American, one Australian and a French person (YES, I am soooo impressed).

The disadvantages of hosting the write-in is that I have to be there on time. Not being fantastic on the old timing front I ended up having to leave before I could eat the lunch I had cooked, taking a small tupperware of three day old Thai prawn curry instead. The next bad thing was that EVERYONE was late. That wasn't as huge a problem as I make it sound as we are now leading into the good things.

The advantages are that I got two and a half hours (in a row) of uninterrupted me time. To have wasted more than a second of that time would have been stupid, so straight after I'd eaten the Thai prawn curry, I got cracking. I was so busy that I didn't even notice that the first writer had been ringing the bell for the last five minutes!

So, the word count for just under two hours (what with cups of tea, introductions and some cake eating) was just under 2,000. Maybe it was a little bit more given what I had deleted.

The other good thing was that I remembered comments, those lovely little pink, blue (whatever colour your computer does) bubbles where I can write myself a little reminder of why that part of the plot is no good and how it can be fixed and then I write as if I had fixed it.

So, that's me, now let's see how the characters are doing.

Today Ella is stuck in a cave and needs to get home pretty quickly or Will will start wondering where she is. She's a bit reluctant to go as she's just made a pretty amazing discovered about Leo and her supposed best friend Morgane and she's got about a million and one questions to ask. Also I don't quite know how to get Ella home, so I may just leave that till the rewrite and worry about it then.

Leo is with Ella and has rescued her mobile phone, and well, he's also rescued Ella, but he's going to be no help in getting her home. And there's no way he's going to answer her questions quickly, so she's just going to have to wait until tomorrow.

And Will is in the pub with Travis. That is more exciting than it sounds, but I haven't worked out how yet.

My word count is at 14,221 words.

Check me out here.