Day 2 & So On - NaNoWriMo

The following days were more staring at the blank screen.  I worked on a few of the other stories.  Finally, I opened up a text document and just started writing.  Now I was in a quandary of self imposed limits-not the editing kind.  Did that document constitute research?  Was it back story?  If I added these to the Novel of the Year, would I be able to count those words?  Funny how the inner critic rears its noisome head.  I continued on.

Character names at that point were limited to Friend One, Friend Two, Friend Three, Warrior, and Sidekick.  I had the main idea down.  Figured out how the characters would be interacting with each other and how they'd work toward the main objective.  Still hadn't put another word in the handy dandy writing program.  I sat and looked at that program, with all the blank documents.  I checked out the word counter.

I looked at my text document sitting on my desktop.  There were more words in there that maybe I could just add in the synopsis and do the character sheets.   Yes, that is what I did.  Now, a problem of a different sort.  Templates.  Templates for Characters, templates for Setting, And template for Daily Target.  Well two out of three wasn't bad.  I still hadn't had anything written in the Daily Target.

In the process of transferring stuff from the text document, I realized, I'd written quite a bit of words.  So, I thought to meself, yes, I have been hitting the daily target.  Whereupon, I stuck to the writing program with it's handy dandy Story Board.

Now, I am a self confessed Pantser and never really got the point of the Story Board.  Just seemed like extra work and not really helpful for my purposes-a 50,000 word Novel which I'd decided was going to be 100,000 words since those other writers were able to do so.  If they could, I could.  I learned differently.  Without that StoryBoard, I'd never have come close to the 75,000 mark, much less 100,000.  By the end of the first week, I made good progress.  Was quite happy with my story.

Then disaster.  I got sick.  Went to the clinic, hoping to head off the worst.  Pretty much slept through the next four days.  Thought I was doing good with the taking of the correct doses at the correct time.  Nah.  Managed to write a few words here and there.  Some even made sense.  What I did do during this time was make the discovery of the Writing Tools which included Character Name Generator.  Promptly, found names for the characters.  Even generated a couple dozen more.  One never knows when another name would come in handy.  Mostly, I just slept.