I feel like I’ve made progress this week. Not as much as I’d like, but I can say that progress was still made. With 56 days remaining until the end of the year, I have about 52k words left on my Regency Beneath His Touch and figure I’m about 42% of the way done. I’ve almost made my +5k goal for this week. That gives me Thanksgiving, Christmas and two other days off at this point. Phew!
Working with others has been extremely helpful in achieving my word count each day. Just knowing someone else is out there working at the same time on their own project is incredibly motivating and inspiring. I’ve noticed more and more people joinging in with #amwriting, #writegoal, #goalwar on Twitter and I know many people gather in chat rooms like the one on Romance Divas. Some groups are even using AIM’s group chat feature to do timed writing sprints. No matter where you find it, or what you call it, it works for many people. When you have to admit how many words you did or didn’t write, it can push you to keep at it.
Even though I’m not doing NaNoWriMo this year, I’m still reading about it and one of the great finds this year is Justine Larbalestier and Scott Westerfeld‘s dueling NaNoWriMo tips on their blogs. In Ms. Larbalestier’s post NaNo Tip No. 2: The Zen of First (Zero) Drafts, someone in the comments there mentioned that Nora Roberts calls that first rough draft the “discovery draft.”
I love that term and it’s accurate for the way I write as well. I may work with scads of spreadsheets and try to pinpoint the bones of my plot down before I start writing, but I still love the discoveries my characters reveal to me along the way. I’ll never be pantser enough to completely trust these little gems, but the fact that they appear from my subconscious pleases me.
Today, I had a couple minor characters surprise me with secrets they’ve been keeping hidden close, but they opened up to my heroine with the least little coaxing on her part. I love surprises like that. It’s a similar kind of fun as setting up random code for an interactive game and watching the resultant emergent behavior of the characters controlled by the computer. It might just be a tad cooler, because it’ll never happen by chance that way again. And that’s just cool.
Monday the 9th is Excerpt Monday again… you all know what that means, right? Yep, it means I have to figure out what I’m going to share this month. I don’t think it’ll be anything new from this ms, but I’ll probably dig into The Flower Queen’s Daughter or Revealed again. Whatever I choose will go live after midnight on Monday and as soon as the other links are live and posted, I’ll add them so you can find even more great excerpts to read for free.