Nanowrimo is going well, I guess… I’m a few thousand words behind at this point but finding that catching up is fairly easy since I’m rewriting and not writing from scratch. When I get to it. Although I realized halfway through that somehow the file had dumped the ending of my story and I DO have to write at least part of it again from scratch. Sigh. Such is the burden of bad organizational skills, though. I’m sure I did it to myself.
The new system I’m using has been working beautifully, in case you were wondering. I have the whole novel down on note cards with a description of what needs to be fixed, and they’re in a strange order since I moved things around quite a lot. Scene 32 comes right before scene 24 now, for instance. But it’s been nice to just drag that stuff around in Scrivener and then consult the card on what needs fixing, and not worry overmuch about reading through the entire document for the millionth time. Pretty prose comes later.
What’s really been keeping me from Nano are two things. One is that it is the end of the semester, and I’m going crazy trying to in fit my fieldwork hours (observing a school and teaching a week), and writing lesson plans for a group of students who is already behind where they should be (what will I be actually teaching in 3 weeks? No one knows…).
The last is the baby. I know he’s supposed to start skipping his morning nap sometime between now and eighteen months, and he fights me HARDCORE on going down in the am. But he’s sleeping for, like, 1 1/2 to 2 hours, so I feel like he probably still needs it? His afternoon nap is still long, too. I don’t know. But by the time I’ve spent an hour lying on the floor of his bedroom being yelled at, I’m usually too frazzled to want to pull out the manuscript.
All contributors to why I’m so behind. But lets be honest, I’m always behind at this point in Nanowrimo, and I seem to have somehow missed the week 2 loathing, too, so perhaps I shouldn’t be complaining. I’m still well poised to win from behind.
Just keep writing, right?
Casey E. Hamilton 