1,951 wds.

This morning I plugged away for another 914 words. I did the math, and 50,000 words in 30 days works out to be 1,666.6 words per day. Which if you don't suffer from writer's block is only two solid hours of writing, or maybe even less.
Thus far the writing has been pretty average. I realize that my main character is a drab bore and not someone I really want to write about. With the frenzied pace I'll fix him as I go along and get back to editing him in the beginning sometime in December when I'm working on my crappy screenplay.
Then as usual I've discovered some nice surprises, an interesting character, a conflict I hadn't conceived of, a good passage. Stellar stuff.

1,010 wds.

That was something. That was an hour of output, straight through. Hardly any stopping to think. Must be pure crap. But that's how it goes I suppose. My spelling was extremely bad by the end, which isn't saying much for me but even worse than usual. The sleep deprivation I think. This definitely give me material to work with and more importantly a sense of momentum which I hope to carry on with my other writing. That sense that you're not really writing until you're outputting large amounts of text. Obviously quality is a problem but with practice, quality improves. These are some of the principals I'm operating on. Goodnight.

Check out the novel at: http://ryanjs-novel.blogspot.com/

Eve of the Storm

As Michael discovered, November is National Novel Writing Month, and a website called NaNoWriMo (http://www.nanowrimo.org/) sponsors a write a novel in a month contest, which I am participating in for various reasons. Number one, I'm crazy. Number two, I believe output is key to success and growth as a writer. Number three, nothing seems to inspire me, meaning I'm willing to try anything. The goal is to write 50,000 words, starting at 12:01AM on November 1st and culminating at mid-night on November 30th. That's roughly 200 pages, of double spaced text, or 6.6 pages per day.

As I write this it is less than 45 minutes before the novel writing contest opens. I've been excited about it because I think the push is what I need to enable my writing, in the same way that lifting weights can give you energy for the rest of your day. Plus the story idea came to me readily and went together well, maybe because of the energy swirling around me thinking about the daunting task of writing so many words. At any rate in the past I'd considered going back to working on another novel I had in the works because it's a project I'm not as personally invested in as say screenwriting, or fiction articles, in other words, it's just writing. It doesn't have to be perfect or even good, in the same way that writing a journal is easy because of the casualness and freedom. (Casualness is a word by-the-way, I just looked it up.)

But mostly I'm tired. I don't stay up until mid-night, and certainly not to think. My head has that heavy feeling, that chanting that says, go to bed, you'll love it––and indeed I would. As Michael said, it's the same feeling you get when you have a ten page paper that you haven't started due the next day––of course sleep is going to sound like a good idea.