Nanowrimo: Day Five - 10%

Word Count: 5,772

Day five and I'm still struggling, but it's getting easier. I spent most of today procrastinating - grocery shopping, helping Wifey out with some small renos and house-hunting.

I did get in an hour of good writing time though, and got just over 1,400 words down. My goal of 15k by COE tomorrow night is a long way away to say the least, but if I can get somewhere close I'll be happy.

I'm measuring my successes in small steps at the moment - just sitting down at the keyboard and making my characters do something (anything!) is a success at this point. I've also been reading the Nano forums and pep talks and doing little bits of reading in between to keep me in the right frame of mind.

I'm not ashamed to admit that more than once last night I wanted to walk away from the keyboard and throw it in completely. Instead, I went and made myself a coffee, ate a piece of chocolate from my treat stash, and asked myself what is the story that I really want to be writing.

Turns out it wasn't the same one I'd started on Tuesday night. Go figure! Half the words I've written so far belong to that story, and I'm still counting them in my tally since they're still words on a page I didn't have at the start. If I manage to get past the 50,000 words though, I'll totally discard them at the end.

So what happened when I came back in, re-caffeinated and more determined? I thought about the essence of the story I started and what I wanted to say. I have some great scenes written that will hopefully end up in another book some day, but they're just not right for this one. And they're just not right for the theme of the story I really wanted to write.

So, I put all my characters in a line-up. I threw some darts and picked a couple, and then did some what-ifs. I ended up changing my main character to a girl, her best friend to a boy, and tossed in a few elements from the original plot just to make things interesting.

So far, in the roughly 3,000 words I've written in the new improved Nano-novel, I've managed to pull out no less than six different extra plot points and discovered some things about these characters I never knew before. There's skeletons in closets and secrets galore.

And yes, someone is still going to die. At the moment, it's a roll of the dice who it's going to be, and not even my characters know at this point. Which is probably a good thing - they'd react differently if they knew they were going to cark it.

I'm heading back to it to see if I can hit 7-8,000 words by COE tonight.

Before I go though, a big shout out to everyone who's seen me pop up on facebook or in person, or had texts from me the last few days and asked "Shouldn't you be writing?" Thanks guys.