NaNoWriMo 2010, Week Two

Well. Week two of NaNoWriMo 2010 was not nearly as productive as week one, alas.

Much of this can be blamed on some sort of stomach flu or something I came down with over the last few days, which made it rather difficult to focus on writing, or to get anything else done. Saturday, indeed, marks my all-time low point; I was feeling sufficiently under the weather that I managed to add a grand total of one word. (The word was "Chand". It's a character name. Though one that may change.)

Honestly, though, even before that I wasn't doing so great. Oh, last Monday was fine; I got over 4,500 words—not my best day ever (that would be the previous day, when I broke 6,000), but very respectable. Sadly, however, on only one later day (Wednesday) did I manage even half that, and that just barely. All told, this week I averaged about 2,165 words per day this week... not terrible, I guess, and certainly more than the 1,667 minimum NaNoWriMo officially recommends, but significantly less than the 3,400+ I averaged my first week. And not enough to finish my novel unless I pick up the pace... oh, I'll clear 5,000 words, easy; I'm already nearly 80% there and the month's not quite half over; but I expect the first draft of my novel, Ichor, to be around 100,000 words, and I'll need to do better to reach that. (Yes, I said before I expected the novel to end up around 80,000 to 90,000 words. But, see, I've also come to realize that when I go through and do rewrites and tighten things up, it's probably going to be losing a lot of words—I've already mentioned that I'm cutting the entire first chapter, and I'm sure I'll find plenty of other phrases and passages that I can do without. So I'm expecting the first draft to be significantly longer than the final novel.)

I'm not too worried, though; unless I come down with something else (and possibly even then), I'm pretty sure I'll be able to move things along and get done with my novel in time. However, I'd mentioned in my first post that if I got Ichor done well enough before the end of the month I'd use the rest of the month to write a young adult novel I'd just had the idea for. And it looks pretty certain now that that's not going to happen.

(Okay, if I'm going to be talking about that YA novel, I guess I ought to refer to it by name. But its (tentative) title is rather long, and I don't know that I particularly want to reveal it in full right now anyway, so I'll just refer to it by a partial title, The Emerald Coin.)

But, in several ways, that's just as well. For one, I've been having a hard time plotting out The Emerald Coin anyway. Mostly because I've got Ichor on the mind, and every time I try concentrating on The Emerald Coin, I end up thinking about Ichor instead. Which I suppose is not surprising, given my current absorption in writing Ichor, and maybe it's for the best that I focus on it for now.

Even when I finish Ichor, though, I don't think I want to start The Emerald Coin right away. Thing is, there's another YA novel I'd decided I wanted to write about a year or two ago, tentatively titled Wormhole. But when I had the idea for The Emerald Coin, I decided I wanted to write that first, partly because it was likely to be shorter. On further consideration, however, I think it would be best if I write Wormhole first after all, for several reasons. For one, I have less planning left to do on it. For another, there are some things about The Emerald Coin that may make it a bit of a harder sell, if I don't already have another published credit under my belt. So... still planning on writing a YA novel, just not the same YA novel I was referring to in the first post.

And not still planning on trying to write it before the end of November. That's clearly not going to happen. Ichor I'll write in November. Wormhole... well, I'd say in December, but I'm not sure I can pull that off, even if it is going to be shorter than Ichor. (I'm currently guessing about 75,000 words.) But I'll try to get the first draft done by maybe the end of January. We'll see how that goes.

Which isn't to say, of course, that I'm not going to do any writing in December. I'm going to start Wormhole in December; I'm just not likely to finish it then. Especially since I'm also going to be doing rewrites on Ichor, and trying to get a few short stories done and, I hope, published. So, yeah, I'll be keeping busy. (Not to mention all the non-writing-related stuff I'm also going to be doing, obviously, but that's not what this blog's about.)

Anyway, though, that's next month. For this month, I'm just working on Ichor. And I plan to get a lot more done on it this next week than I did the last...