Day 1 of NaNoWriMo 09

So far so good. Today was the first day of NaNoWriMo and I racked up 3,510 words. I’m a little over a day ahead of schedule. With one weekend trip and unknown Thanksgiving plans ahead, getting as far ahead on word count as I can right now is going to be key.

In case you’re wondering, I’ve decided on a tiered system of backups to make sure I don’t lose this book if the new hard drive fails. I’m writing my novel on Word and saving it in a file on my desktop. Once it’s saved there, I upload it into Scrivener and put it into a file by chapter (not for backup purposes, but to make it easier to edit later). Then, I email the file to myself from my yahoo account into my google account. And, I’ll also be putting the entire desktop word document file onto my backup hard drive once a week. Flying by the seat of my pants was fun while it lasted, but for the foreseeable future I am going to be one of those nutso-super-backed-up people. (I draw the line at printing anything out, though.)

One question that’s been hard for me to answer -- Am I rewriting the immortality book? Yes and no. I decided to use some advice from Carolyn See’s book to create a better version of my novel. Basically, I made one list of everything I love to read, and another list of everything I hate to read. Now, I’m adding all the things on my love list to my novel and dropping the topics I hate. This is actually harder than you’d think. Those hateful things have a way of making themselves sound necessary. Such as children, victims, and descriptions of houses. blah.

One thing I realized when I was making my lists was that I was a lot more excited about the first chapters I wrote a year ago, even though they had less literary merit than the latest ones, because those chapters centered on the elements I'm excited to read about. There was mystery, intrigue, excitement, and a lot less brooding. It’s just so much fun to write about the handsomest man and woman in the world alone on an island with a bunch of deranged mutants and a mad scientist. I mean, come on! I’d love to believe that farther into the process I can edit it into a smart commentary on interpersonal relationships in the modern world or something, but for sanity’s sake I think I owe it to myself to just write the pulpy first draft that I want it to be. (And also apparently write the phrase “gave the appearance of” twelve times on every page, because I am completely o.o.c.)

Anyway, I won’t be posting much on the blog in the coming weeks (why start now, right?). I don’t want to waste my writing energies on posts that aren’t required by my employer or the NaNoWriMo rulebook. So have a nice early November and I’ll talk to you around Black Friday.