mini NaNo

I love National Novel Writing Month (NaNo).  I love the weird, weird things people say on the forums.  I love the charts of your progress.  I love how people who've never written before will go, "Yeah!  I can write a novel!" and they'll fly with that confidence for at least a few days.  The word count part isn't hard for me, and I always have some idea of something to write.

So it took me a while to realize why I so often "fail" at NaNo.

It's the "all new content" part that trips me up.  I have to be writing constantly, or I feel like I will explode.  So the stars have to align where one project ends on Oct 31st so I can start another on Nov 1st for NaNo. 

This is the problem I had last year.   I was pretty close to done with edits on a previous novel when NaNo rolled around, and I put those edits on hold to write something new.  I got about 30,000 words into it, then missed my old project too much and had to go back to it.  At the time, I said that I'd said everything I wanted to say with the new project, and it just ended up not being 50,000 words.  But I'm now thinking that was an excuse to not abandon my baby. 

I want to do the Chicago Center for Paranormal Support story for NaNo this November, since I haven't made all that much progress on it.  But the reason I haven't made much progress is because I've been distracted by a stupid, useless novel that's like a big, guilty pleasure. 

I need to finish it before November.

And I figure that I don't really have 50,000 words left to write on this thing, and I do have a full month.  So let's mini NaNo this sucker! 

The problem though with this is that I write out of order, and getting chapters that are half written in shape means that I'm actually adding very few words to my word count total.  I'm in that quilting and ironing phase, making sure things I wrote a while ago still work, that I haven't repeated myself, that they flow together.  Wednesday, when I started mini NaNo, I made loads of progress, spent three hours on it, and then checked how my total word count had grown.

...I'd added 500 words.

It looked super, but still.  500 words?  If time and word output are proportional, to hit 1,666, I'd have to work for like 9 hours.

So to fix this, I'm looking chapter by chapter, and seeing how much of it I've got in shape from the beginning to where I have the first gap that needs filling.  Suddenly, I wrote so much more!  I'd been working long sections into place, and once one's in place, that's like 1,000 words right there. 

And this is how I'm spending October: trying to get this thing done.  Follow along with the #miniNaNo tag on my twitter.