NaNoWriMo Report – Day 8

I sat up on October 31, waiting as the minutes ticked away. At the stroke of midnight I was poised, ready to start writing. After much internal debate, I had settled on an idea. I knew how it began and how it ended, and a lot of what was going to happen in between. What I did not know, were the names of the characters. So, I went to my favourite baby naming site and asked my husband to pick a letter at random. After finding my hero’s name, I went through the same procedure for my heroine’s name. My villain is still known only as X.

There were several different places to start this novel, and I dithered for quite a while over where would be best. Finally, I just picked one at random, knowing I could go back and change it at any time. Actually, I’ve got a few paragraphs bracketing the beginning that could be turned into alternate beginnings.

So, needless to say, I got off to a slow start. In fact, for the first few days I was falling further and further behind. The writing was coming in fits and starts. I was spending copious amounts of time just staring blankly at my screen. By about day four I was something like 2,900 words behind.

Then a miracle happened. My characters decided to have sex. I wasn’t going to let them do this until they were safely on the spaceship, but my FMC told me bluntly that if I thought she was going to have sex for the first time on a spaceship with a man who had kidnapped her, then I had another thing coming. She wanted to have sex with him for the first time in her own bed. So I agreed, and started catching up on my word count.

Then I remembered that this was NaNo, not a serial, and I didn’t have to write everything in a linear fashion. I could jump around if I wanted. So then I wrote a rather lengthy scene that takes place near the end and again, my word count continued to climb.

And then, I added in a scene towards the end where my MMC has himself put on trial for supposed crimes against the FMC and she goes into the courtroom and proves that he’s just being a noble jack ass. And now I’m pretty much caught up on my NaNo word count.

Next week, I probably be worrying that I’ll run out of story before I run out of words. :-)