50K

Well, I just passed 50,000 words on my novel, Ichor. (I'm at 50,117, to be exact... only that's not really exact because, again, it's probably counting some dashes that shouldn't really be counted... still, close enough.) Which means I've now officially "won", as far as NaNoWriMo is concerned. (Well, okay, I guess it won't really be "official" until the word count is verified at the NaNoWriMo site, and the validator won't be active to do that until the 25th... all right, yeah, I'll try to cut down on the parentheticals.) But the novel isn't finished yet, and I wasn't writing it just to "win" at NaNoWriMo, so of course this doesn't mean the end of my writing for the month. In fact, I hope to get at least another thousand words in tonight, though we'll see if that happens.

Actually, if I want to finish the first draft of Ichor by the end of the month (which I do—yeah, that was another parenthetical; sorry), I'm a bit behind schedule. As I said last post, I expect the first draft to be around 100,000 words, which means I really should have hit 50,000 words three days ago. Still, I'm not far behind schedule, and certainly not so far that I can't catch up. (Though, if I don't, it's not a disaster; I can finish in December. I'd much rather finish by the end of this month, though. And dang, I really am addicted to these parentheticals!)

I'm not sure, on reflection, if not having had the entire crew of the ship all planned before I started writing as I had intended to do, along with their exact positions and schedules, is really a wholly bad thing. In some ways, it would have made the writing process smoother, yes, but it might have lessened the flexibility, made it harder to insert on the fly a character I realized I needed for a specific plot point. On the other hand, I could have inserted the character in question, rearranged the crew list accordingly, and made sure in the edits to revise anything necessary before that point to accord with the changes. That would have been a little unwieldy... but more unwieldy than making up the composition of the crew as I went, and trying to keep track of it all? As I said, I'm not sure. Though I'm still leaning toward the opinion that yes, it would have been better to have everything planned out in more detail before I started writing. If I hadn't been intent on starting writing on the first of November for NaNoWriMo, I certainly would have spent more time in planning. Though then there would always be the danger of spending so much time in planning that I never got around to writing... and I'm sure there still would have been new ideas coming up during the writing that I hadn't accounted for in my plans, so there still would have been some changes necessary...

Anyway, whether or not this was the best approach, I think it's safe to say it's working out. Not having planned everything in detail beforehand is going to mean more edits and revisions after the first draft is done to get it all to work together just as I want, but in the long run the novel's not going to suffer for it.

I could say more about my writing process for Ichor, but I've got my NaNoWriMo Week Three post coming up in three days; I think I'll save the rest of my ruminations till then. In any case... I think I'm about halfway there, and pretty close to being on schedule. So far so good...