A NaNo Update

NaNoWriMo is going great!  

Or, at least it’s going good…

Ok, I’m behind on my  word count, but it’s not like I’m so behind I’ll never catch up.

[Insert catch phrase of 16 year old daughter:  “Don’t Judge Me.”]

I haven’t started writing yet today.  My current word count is 12,235.  Not bad for 9 days of writing.

Well… if we’re going to get technical about it, it’s been 6 days of writing.  I didn’t write at all the first day of NaNo, and I got a little sidetracked a couple other days…

Which doesn’t make me a sucky NaNoWriMo’er (Yes, it’s a word — I just used it!), it just means that, when I put my heart and mind into it, I can sit down and spew out a bunch of words that may or may not be the work of a literary genius form complete and/or coherent sentences.

And, as you can see by the above handy dandy gadget up there, hitting 50K is still completely doable!  I just need to average 1,793 words/day instead of 1,667.

Before NaNo started, I actually did an outline.  I had my characters all figured out…  I was a total Planner!

And then I started actually writing my novel.

And what was supposed to be the beginning…  is now the end.  There is a strong possibility that my original idea is going to be the sequel for this book.  Which is both exciting and also incredibly frustrating all at the same time.

How did this happen?

Well, it’s simple really.  The original novel would have started with a bombing.   But there was a huge problem with that…  I needed readers to immediately love the bomber.  And the only way I could do that (without my novel ending up being twice as long because of all the flashbacks and explaining), was to write the events that led up to the bombing.

A little bit of a side note…  Given my characters need for chemical knowledge and bomb making skills, I’m a little worried the NSA is going to come question me about a possible terrorist agenda.   I actually have this in my draft right now:

[Insert info. re: chemicals, devices, bomb types, blast radii, etc.]

because I’m scared to have it on my browser history.

How’s your November going?  Are you participating in NaNoWriMo?  I know that some of you are doing NaBlaPoMo.  How’s that going?  (I’d REALLY  like to know if anyone is crazy enough to do both!)