Mad Mondays: NaNoWriMo Update (Week 2)

If you look to the right, you'll see my word count meter. I'm nearly on target, but it seems I'm floundering a little.
Which is fine. I'm treading water and preparing to catch up soon. National Novel Writing Month, 2014, has been exciting so far!

First, it's my first time writing a mystery novel. Never mind that my plot is not suspenseful in any way, shape, or form, and that my characters are blander than brick walls--it's still been really fun so far. A step outside of the Science Fiction/Fantasy biosphere has proved to be a great step. It helps improve my writing and show me untold possibilities about what I can write.

Second, I haven't written fiction in bulk for quite a few months, and this is helping me get back on track to writer-dom.

Now, let's talk about Week Two. It always gets a bad rap from WriMos, specifically because it tends to be the week in which a lot of writers lose their will, their gumption, their motivation. To me, it's my week of epiphany. Week One is always dull and boring, an uninspired pile of drivel written to propel myself forward until the end. I start thinking, "This is a great concept!" but from the first page, I know it's going to be crap. But I write anyway, and inevitably, at the end of Week One I slack off. But then Week Two happens. I have to catch up and the fight or flight instinct kicks in and I find myself sprinting back to the goal line to slam the ball into the net. With the bulk of writing I'm doing to catch up, I grant myself new inspiration. My characters grow. I realize the concept, not in the mind, but on the page (well, word processor, not page).

And from then on, NaNoWriMo is pretty easy for me. Even now, I'm having more fun than in all of Week One. My advice is: let yourself give up, but then come back and try to catch up as hard as you can. Unless you're one of those people who's already over 20,000 words by Day 8. To those people, I have one thing to say: You are crazy mutant lizard aliens.

-JW