NaNo Week One Update

I'm one week into National Novel Writing Month, so this is a good time to do an assessment of how I'm doing. 

Quantitative assesments are pretty easy for Nano, what with all the graphs and stats they give to show word count.  But one of the steps of my four step plan of attack for this year is to be compassionate and forgiving to myself.  I'm making progress.  I made an effort.  So way to go me!  Great job! 

I'm kind of impressed that this is working so well.  I don't feel horribly guilty for how far behind I am or how horribly awful my product is, and I don't feel frustrated with my life and my family and my writing.  That's better than some of my non-Nano months.

Planning ahead of time has also worked out surprisingly well so far.  Every time I sit down to write, I check my outline, and I can see exactly what I'm going to write for the next half hour.  I've gone into my outline a few times to make some additions--little things that became clearer as I was writing--but I haven't made any drastic changes and no changes to anything I've already written.  The research I did before hand also helped, but not in that it's all done and usable now.  It's helping more because I did my research and then told myself I was done for November, and now when new things crop up that I didn't realize I would need to investigate, I'm SOL because research time is over.  Again, I'm kind of baffled that I've been able to let it go.  That's not like me.  But then again,iIt helps that I'm so strapped for time that there's just no way I'm going to manage to fool around on Wikipedia for ten minutes.  And by ten minutes, I mean an hour.

What's interesting is I think this is the closest I've ever been to doing Nano as the Official Nano Gods intended.  In previous years, I've had hours every day to write, so I've polished as I went along, taking my time to make the tone and the meter work for me, going back to incorporate my blossoming ideas.  But this year I have maybe a half hour before the baby wakes up and decides that he can't be in this coffee place for one more second, or before my husband comes into the bedroom where I've set up my laptop and closed the door for the illusion of an effective work space and says, "I've got a hungry baby!"  There is no editing.  There is no staring off into space to find the perfect phrasing.  There is just a mad dash to get as much down as I can.  There's just the cycle of setting Write or Die for 500 words for 30 minutes, then vomiting up sentences so the screen doesn't turn red.  Sometimes they're sentences.  Sometimes I don't even manage that.

It's by far the worst first draft I've ever written. 

It's just awful.  When I edit this thing in January, it's going to be a mess.  A painful, frustrating mess.  I'm going to have to relive this horror--or live it for the first time because right now I'm not even giving it the time to settle.  Tone, diction, exposition, epic dullness. You name it and it's a problem.  Today I wrote, "There was a fire metaphor in there somewhere, but he couldn't think of it," and then I wrote two hundred more words of equally stupid garbage.  It would be embarrassing if anyone read it, which they will over my dead body after they've figured out my laptop password and puzzled through which Untitled Document is the one I've updated most recently.