NaNoWriMo Week One Report

Has it been a week already since NaNoWriMo began? That was my first thought when I noticed the reminder to write this post on my calendar. That's a good sign, too, because whenever the passage of time completely drops off my radar I know my head is where it should be -- in the work. This is also why I set multiple alarms around the house, write daily notes to myself and become enslaved to my planner. If I didn't you guys might not see me until December 1st.

My stats for the novel are healthy and on track; I've been writing to or past my wordcount goals each day. I've been getting up an hour earlier every morning to have some quiet time to work and that was a good decision; I get my words done in a couple of hours and then I have the rest of the day to do other things until it's time for my evening editing session. As far as the writing goes I'm enjoying the story and I've kept it pretty faithful to the outline and chapter summaries I planned out back in October. One extra bonus of officially registering this year is the novel stats widget that the NaNoWriMo folks offer on their site; it gives me an excellent snapshot of how I'm performing. Here's what it looks like this morning:



I had planned to get out to one of the local NaNoWriMo events and meet some of my fellow writers in the area. I'd like to blame my busy schedule for failing to do that, but truth is I've not had a lot of success mingling in person with other writers, and I don't know if as a pro I'd be especially welcome. When people find out you do this for a living they see you more as an affront to their genius or a commodity to be used, and I don't care to be either. Anyway, I put that on the back burner for now.

I had one really bad day this week, which was unexpected. Fortunately, I got my words done a few hours before the trainwreck happened. I was going to use it for a blog post, and wrote up a beautiful, absolutely scalding rant about it. I waited twenty-four hours, got over it, and deleted the whole thing. I overreacted to a silly, juvenile situation that was really not worth ten seconds of my time, and as we all know, the best revenge for being derailed by someone is to get right back on track, right in their face. From my POV, by refusing to let it spoil the rest of my week I won that round.

My big reward for myself this past week was to go on a fun school field trip to the RenFaire, which got me out of the house, gave me a chance to walk for a couple hours (which my legs definitely needed) and spend quality time with the kid. I also watched and photographed an excellent joust hosted by Shane Adams (who aside from being my favorite modern-day knight was also the inspiration for Aedan mac Byrne from Evermore, who will be returning to the shelves in Nightbound next May) and found a very cool handmade leather journal at one of the artisans tents that went home with me. It was a great day, and exactly what I needed to recharge my batteries.

I'm a bit behind on my chores, and the to-do list for the holidays gets a little longer every day, so for the next week of NaNo I'm going to try to build on what I've been doing, organize my time a little better, and work a little harder at keeping everything in balance. By writing past quota I've earned an extra day off, but I don't need it right now so I'm going to save it for later on in the month when I probably will.

How was your first week of NaNoWriMo? Let us know in comments.