Only five days to the end of November. Only five days to the end of NaNoWriMo. But ‘The Shapeshifters’ is a long way from finished.
I started planing this story, with all my usual twists and turns, but you can read more about it on ‘Hello NaNoWriMo and lots of Shapeshifters‘.
I made plans and then I made a plan for the plans… now I have a new plan. But about the planning stage of this story you can read more in ‘Setting up my NaNo Project and Prepping all the must have’s‘.
If you’ve been following me on social media you already know that I managed to write my 50K for NaNoWriMo on the 13th of November.
I was a few scenes away from the mid point, when I hit the 50K, and I over estimated how much it would take to write this story. I figured I could aim towards 100 000 words, so that I would have a bit of a wiggle room for cutting during editing processes.
Well, this didn’t happened!
I’m very conscious of what I put in when I’m writing fiction. I tend to write in a way that gives just enough details for the reader to imagine the rest, and allow them to make the bigger connections between the information if they want to.
I don’t employ many words in creative descriptions. Purple prose doesn’t captivate me when I’m writing fiction. And I didn’t want to fill it with unnecessary junk just to make the word count. So, no 100K for ‘The Shapeshifters’#1.
On day 23 of November, I already knew I wouldn’t be writing much more than the 77K. Even if I know I have a few more things to add, even entire scenes. But this will not represent 30K of writing. It really isn’t possible to accomplish on the remaining days of this NaNoWriMo… and I’ll tell you why in a moment.
I started getting a bit fretful about this, it’s been a freaky gut turner, but I figured I wanted to study my options first.
Option #1. I could go ahead and start revising the draft.
But this is usually a more slow paced activity and it would not produce the 1667 words per day I needed to put in.
Option #2. Or, I could move on to ‘The Shapeshifters’#2.
But this meant starting another rough-rough draft without having done my due diligences.
And… I’m not emotionally prepared for this!
Another detail, that might seem stupid to you, but it’s important to me, I really wanted to earn all the badges on NaNoWriMo website.
I can now tell you that this will not happen.
First badge: I will not hit my daily count every single day of November, because I already achieved the 50k and I’m not going for 100K anymore.
Second badge: I don’t know if I’ll be able to update the daily count every day, because editing is different from writing.
On the 23rd of November I tried to start editing the draft.
I know it needs a lot of work, but editing is different from fully writing, so I did some editing… 278 words worth of editing.
And on the 24th of November I went back to the drawing board.
I’m starting my edits now and there are some details that need to go in, and some considerations to be done now, if I want to write this trilogy properly.
And I do want to write this trilogy properly!
So, I’m all in my drawing board mood.
For now, I’m trying to hold on to my win here. I wrote 77k on a draft in twenty two days. That’s a win.
I did it at a faster pace than I imagined possible.
I had great fun writing and rereading this story.
I identified some must have’s and need to do’s and I’m focusing on doing those.
I’ll be talking a bit about this on this week’s YouTube vídeo. Please, don’t forget to subscribe to VLook and hear all about it.