I hit the NaNoWriMo wall today. Other than at the height of my flu last week I’ve managed to do at least 1000 words each day so far. But today I just couldn’t get anything out. I reached the end of Act One on Friday and just couldn’t resist going back and editing. Fatal mistake. With the editing underway forward progress is obviously going to be slower. But today neither happened, even though I had plenty of spare time. The main reason is I just didn’t feel any excitement about the story of SWORD today. Hoepfuly it will come back tommorow.
I think the editing is essential though. I’m quite happy with the 14, 000 words of Act One except they’ve taken my protagonist in the wrong direction. At the moment that direction is fixable but if I carry on any further I’ll end up with thousands of completely unusable words that I will just have to junk once NaNoWriMo is over, which really defeats the point of doing it.
I’m well off the NaNo pace now but may pull an all nighter once the edits to Chapter One are done and try and get back into the race. I haven’t done a really epic writing session like that since I wrote all 7500 words of Titan in one 18 hour sitting . I didn’t write anything after that for about 6 months so I won’t be risking burn out with anything that extreme again, but perhaps a slightly more mellow 4AM cut off point would work.
Damien Walter 