NaNo Day 1

It's strange how you can look forward to something for weeks and then, when it's finally time to do that thing, it's suddenly less interesting. I've been looking forward to starting Book 2 for awhile, but now that I have, I'm already in that "oh look, something shiny" mood, and have been distracted for much of the evening. I've written a thousand words or so and while that's less than the daily average, I'm okay with it.

I'm not okay with how much those words suck, however. I know, I know. That's supposed to be the beauty of NaNoWriMo. I'm supposed to just go full hog into this project, my inner editor squashed in the name of churning out words and chapters at a ridiculous pace. The idea of having something finished by the end of the month is so sweet. Before I know it, I could have two novels to try to get published!

But if what I write is terrible, what's the point? Rewriting is a tedious process, as I've learned over the last few months. What's more, I seem to have this perfection issue. I can (and have) read my book 1 over and over again and still find things I want to change, things I want to add. Just looking over what I've written so far for Book 2, it's going to need a lot of work. Am I better off just taking this slow and forgetting this challenge? It's not like 50,000 is even a full novel, really. Book 1 is nearly twice that, and I feel I would at least want to hit the 60,000 mark (arbitrary number but it feels right).

Then again, there's more to this novel writing month than writing the novel. What I really have been looking forward to is interacting with other writers, something I haven't really done before (and something I haven't been able to do today thanks to the nano website bugging). It would be cool to become a part of a network of writers, even if I end up only interacting with a few. It would also be fun to join up with local NaNo folks, though how people are able to write with other people around is beyond me.

So I guess I'll stick with it, at least through the weekend to gauge where I am. Work is about to get crazy and tortuous (hello overtime, you foul monster) so I may be fooling myself to even think this is possible. But the only thing that will get hurt is my sleep schedule and that's already an issue so here I go!