Home Stretch Already?

We're in the home stretch of NaNo, and boy am I doing pathetic. It is well known that week two is "hell week" for anyone doing NaNo. Week one you still have the excitement pushing you, and most have at least mentally planned out enough to get them through week one. The opening, introducing the characters and environment, and the inciting incident are all fun to write. Authors can just pile on more and more problems.

Then there's week two. This is usually when people start realizing they didn't plan enough for a full 50,000 word novel. They've written past what they had planned, or they only have the ending figured out and aren't sure how to get there. The characters are going to have to solve the problems the author threw at them, and said author isn't really sure how to do that. The isolation needed to stay on-task with writing, coupled with the long hours, starts to get stressful. The daily number counts become harder to reach, and it seems daunting. Authors tend to feel burnt out as they try to figure out that dreaded middle of their story.

Then you have me. I almost always have more than enough planned for a 50,000 word novel, and I tend to have the middle at least vaguely plotted. I might feel a bit of stress about writing instead of socializing or cleaning, but it's not as overwhelming as it seems to be for others. Yes, my writing does slow down during Week Two, just like everyone else, but for me it's not the worst week.

Thanksgiving week. That's the worst. Not because I have to clean and plan to host and cook and all the other regular stressors. It's because I have to plan to pack up for my trip back to my mom's side of the family's large "clan Thanksgiving." I can't squirrel away for the better part of three days. I have a day where I'm driving, and then socializing with my family. Then I have the full Thanksgiving celebration. Then I have the third day of last-minute socializing with the family before another long drive home. As much as I try to sneak away, I never seem to get much accomplished over this weekend. Worse is that I'm usually super far behind at this point and just want to do nothing but write in order to catch up; which never happens.

So, while I feel the pain of Week Two like everyone else, it's really Thanksgiving week that really kills me during NaNo, and this year is no different. I mean, I did bring my laptop with me to the Thanksgiving celebration, with intentions of sneaking away for at least a few minutes in order to write. Of course, it figures that as soon as I discovered my husband has snuck off to play pool, and I followed so I could write in that room, that is when my mother called for me about a half-dozen times to check in on things.

Knives from the Scott Pilgrim comic books
by Bryan Lee O'Malley

Find Hubby. Grab laptop, plug it in, settle on the floor in a spot out of the way enough for Hubby and my sister's boyfriend to keep playing pool without trampling me. Bring up the word file. Read a paragraph or two to figure out where I left off. Mom calls for me. Awkwardly climb up and tuck my computer away so it doesn't get stepped on. Answer my mother's question. Go back to my corner. Write about a sentence. Mom calls again. Awkwardly get up and re-tuck my laptop. Answer my mother again. Go back to the corner. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Then I had my younger cousins sort of swarm me to try to figure out what I was doing, so I tried to explain NaNo to them. They aren't writers, so they not only weren't interested, but they didn't seem all that impressed either. Well, one did mutter "I'd never be able to write that much." So even when I try to sneak away to write I only manage about 100 words or so. Thankfully, I had a good head start that morning before we had to get ready to leave.

This past week I did have a couple of days where I surpassed 1000 words, but most of the week only had a couple hundred words added per day.

Calendar designed by Dave Seah

The other thing is that most of the document I'm working on is actually a detailed outline of where I want to go with the story, as well as sections from my original go at Peeping Tomcat, with intentions of possibly salvaging some of it for this NaNo go at the story. When I write a new section I then delete the bullet point in the outline, as well as the original narrative I reworked. So, as I'm adding words to my story I'm also losing them. So, net-gain, I'm not even at 30,000 words yet. I need to almost double my word count in the next three days; today included!

People have been strongly encouraging me to use the 12,000+ words I wrote a couple Fridays back on my reaction to Varekai. If I also include the blogs I've written this month, as of this sentence, I'm up to 8146 words from my blog.

8146 blog words, 12419 about Varekai, and 29404 for the actual story. I'm now up to 49969. By the conclusion of this blog post I will surpass 50,000 words if you count everything I've typed, well, excluding stuff for work and Facebook statuses. If I include the two notes I wrote for Facebook this month I would have hit 50,000 a couple of days ago!

It's easy for me to hit that word count in one month. It's an entirely different thing to have it all be narrative, and for one project. That's the struggle now.

Still, I personally think that I proved myself to have persevered enough to earn that Winner's shirt, and many have agreed with me.

Cape not included.

I still feel a bit guilty about potentially earning the "won" status for the Peeping Tomcat story itself though, since the story itself won't be 50,000 words, and there will always be that mental asterisk to my win. However, we'll see how I feel about that guilt when it's 11:58pm on November 30th....

My outline for Peeping Tomcat has 14 chapters once completed. I'm currently working on the 7th chapter. The 9th chapter will be when Adrien discovers Marinette is Ladybug, so I have that to work towards. The trick though is that the 8th chapter is another Akuma attack. I tried to spend the long drive home yesterday thinking about what I wanted to do for that since I still don't have any figured out.

The new season of Miraculous does give more potential for Akumatized villains, but it still doesn't really help me figure out what I want to do. I'm leaning towards an Akuma that is after Marinette, causing Adrien to get jealous, but it just doesn't work into the story thus far. I may have to take it into consideration when PT goes through a third complete rewrite.

If any of you have watched Miraculous Ladybug and wants to shoot me some suggestions, I'd love to hear them.

In the meantime, I think I'm going to spend this week-long vacation doing little more than writing.....