Well, I’m already behind… no surprise there.
But I’m not that far behind, and that is a surprise, at least to me. If I hadn’t landed myself a doozy of a migraine Sunday, I think I’d actually be pretty close to on schedule. I’ve been eking out sentences at a snail’s pace for so long I kind of stopped believing it was possible to put anything coherent on paper at this speed. But I’ve (re)learned an important lesson –again– about shutting off Inner Editor.
Inner Editor is great for revisions. She’s a disaster during the first draft, though. This all comes back to the Poo Mantra (doesn’t everything?): if you can accept that it’s going to be crap, you can get much more done. And the truth is, most of your belief that high-speed writing will be crap is probably Inner Editor.
For example:
Yours truly has been working on new scenes for an old favorite, WEAVE. They’re not particularly easy to write as they have to be shoehorned into an existing and complex plot, but really, they’re not that hard. Nevertheless, I’ve written two in twice as many months. They’re pitch-perfect and very shiny, but –really? Two?
Conversely, in honor of NaNo I dug out that wonderful old standby, Write or Die, refused to care whether any three words made sense in relation to any other three I type out (and spelling? psssshh.)… and I’ve written something like 9,000 words in the last week. Three chapters. Nine scenes. I just finished another 1K, in which I managed to a) rename a major character mid-sentence and b) more or less channel Middle English, judging by my spelling… and out of that stream-of-consciousness mess, I got: a library mystery, a love triangle, and a possible murder.
Enough fodder for a truly shiny subplot.
And you know? Once you get past the spelling and continuity errors, it’s really not that bad. Writing this fast requires a willing suspension of self-doubt –which, whether this particular project goes anywhere or not, is a lesson worth 50,000 words.
***
In other less self-reflective news, it’s voting day in Maine. And I am definitely going to go vote, because this year our lovely PsTB have decided they can take away some of the democratic process by removing same-day registration –which they called, hilariously, “preserving the integrity of the voting and election process” (who says politicians aren’t capable of irony?)– and I say hell with that.
People of Maine: please vote! And while you’re at it, please vote YES on Question 1!