Art Isn't Easy

Well, if things went according to plan with the NaNoWriMo thing, I'd be over 20,000 words into my novel by this point.

As usual, things aren't going according to plan. As you can see, I'm only about 33% of the way there. Unless this huge font of words come gushing out of my brain sometime soon, I almost certainly won't meet the 50,000 word mark by the end of the month.

What's gone "wrong?" Nothing, really - it's just a lot harder than it seems. It doesn't help that I'm just not that quick of a writer. For example, the daily word target for NaNoWriMo to hit 50k by the end of the month is 1667 words a day, every day. Today - a day off from work - was my most prolific day at a whopping 1747 words. It surely didn't help that I slept late, ran some errands, a wasted 2+hours on the joke that is Fight Club, but I can't help but think that I still reached the limit of my daily creativity. Which wouldn't be that bad, except that there are a few days every week that I can't write anything at all (there are other things in life, after all). Hence me being far far behind.

That makes it sound like nothing is going right, which isn't true. The fact is, of all my aborted attempts at fiction, none of them have made them this far. And I've still got lots of stuff happening in my head that has to get put on paper, so I feel that I've got more to offer. At the very least, by the end of the month I should have a large chunk of text that will keep developing over the coming weeks. This whole thing has taught me that a little bit of work every few days can pile up into something somewhat substantial.

Most important - this is actually fun! I've given birth to about a half-dozen characters that I sort of care about. I spent most of today working on the back story of a character who wasn't even in my head when this started. It really is a matter of just getting the damn thing started and letting it take you wherever it may lead.