NaNoWriMo, Days 1 and 2

It is day three, but I haven't written anything yet, and I'd like to share what I have so far. I was sharing this on Facebook, and didn't even realize that I should be posting them onto here as well, since I have so little time to do both. I've started my job at Amazon. It's a little rough already, even though the first day all we did was watch videos and demonstrate competence with machinery so simple that everyone felt stupid using it. That's not to say there were some tremendous failures from some of the people, but I think that goes without saying.

I'm still writing my poetry every single day and reading as well, so yeah, I don't have a lot of time right now.

Anyway, I think I'm going to post every day's journal, if I write one, but post them in twos or threes. So without further ado, Days 1 and 2 of my NaNoWriPo (ad)venture:

Day 1:

I've decided to take this challenge on, partially because of the enthusiasm Bianca has for it, and partially because I am apparently down for every free writing challenge known to man.

It's a little different for me, though. I am starting a new job (in 12 hours, or so, actually) and will be continuing to write my poem a day, something which I started during National Poetry Month in April, and haven't missed a day of yet. So it's going to be a little Hellish. Which is apparently how I like writing.

But what makes this even more different is that I actually have about 10000 words already typed up from a novel idea I had during college, which I wrote for Novel Writing I. So because I had always intended on finishing it (it's technically fantasy, for those of you wondering, and it's more fun than literary, which sort of bothers me), and because I already see the difficulty of finishing this with my other obligations, I'm going at this with a bit of a head start.

Except that it doesn't feel that way. I spent the last few hours re-reading over the first 5 or 6 chapters, and heavily rewriting one of them, heavily editing/deleting another, and moving around the order of two of them. So at the end of the day, my word count actually went down a little.

In any case, I now have 9350 words toward my 50000 word goal. Until I start writing material that I have not written in some form before, my word count may stay steady, or may even drop. But hopefully at the end of this month, I will have a considerable portion of a novel done. I am setting the goal at the traditional word limit, and not at a finished manuscript. Because who knows how far that will get me into the actual story?

Day 2:

Before I get into the actual writing portion of this note, let me just explain my first day of work real quick.

Anyone who knows me knows how terrible I am about getting lost. It happens a lot. A whole lot. Even with directions, even to places I have driven a million times before. So I intended on leaving very early for my first day, and just sit in the parking lot with a book on the off chance that I find it easily.

Well, this is a third-shift job, so I took a nap before my shift, and ended up over-sleeping some. Which meant I left late, and surprise-surprise, I can not find the place. I have 10 minutes to find it, and I'm driving up and down this road when I come up with the ingenious idea of following the next car that comes, because it's 7 at night; how many cars could be driving down this road?

Well, long story short, I get lost, and I'm frantically texting my girlfriend to ask her to ask her sister (who worked at Amazon last year) for directions. My text message inbox is full, the road is pitch black and winding, I'm trying to type things, and I'm also pulling out my GPS to try to type in an address, all the while wondering if I should just quit my job. The first day. I end up calling (the number was in my phone's memory) and finding out the road I had was wrong, so I entered that into the GPS and make it to the job about 15 minutes late. Turns out that the line to sign in is so long, that no one could ever have guessed I was late.

So I got home, and wrote. I am at 10,410 words. Which means I wrote 1060, which is well short of my goal of 1600 to 1700 words a day. But I'm counting it as a success. Some days are like this.

As for the writing itself, I realized yesterday that I have not a single female character. So I guess I am Tolkien-ing it up. I'll fix this, I'm sure, but it's interesting writing your first novel, and finding the natural things you do which suck.

Oh. I have re-written large portions of the original 10000 words I had written, which means that events have gone in different directions, which means later chapters can't happen the way they've happened. So I look forward to tomorrow, when I will likely cut 3-4000 words from my manuscript.

Isn't the point of this month to GAIN a word count? haha