Day 13: Halfway home!

Today I had a pure and simple goal for my So-Called Novel: I wanted to reach the halfway point toward my 50,000-word NaNoWriMo goal.

Now that I have almost two weeks of daily novel-writing--and a "half-baked" novel draft--under my belt, I feel like I've learned, gained, or remembered a handful of important things:

• This is a "zero draft." It's not going to read like a "real" (i.e. final draft) novel.
  
• Cranking out 1,000 words doesn't take that much time: less than 40 minutes if I type continuously without stopping to edit.
• If I don't worry about plot, my characters will find things to do with themselves: I just have to sit back and write it.
• Although in retrospect I think trying to write a mystery without having a clearer sense of the plot, clues, etc. was a bad choice, I can still crank out word-count (and throw in some surprising plot twists) if I just let my typing fingers do the talking.
  
• All factual errors, plot glitches, and narrative contradictions can be fixed later if I decide to revise this story.

The biggest thing I've learned from this second year of NaNoWriMo insanity is the fact that a month is far too short a time to decide whether what you've written is "good" or "bad," so that's why you should NEVER delete what you've written: just keep writing and worry about fixing it later. Only now--an entire year later--am I realizing that what I wrote last November wasn't all that bad...especially compared to what I'm writing this year.

They say the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence...and I'd add that Crappy Prose doesn't stink nearly as horrifically after you've let it ripen in the compost pile for, oh, about a year. That doesn't mean that I'm ready to publish last year's So-Called Novel as-it...but it does mean that I'm actually looking forward to going back to revise it now that the pain of writing it has passed. And perhaps this is the best way to "use" NaNoWriMo: as a way of generating a new So-Called Novel draft so you'll be really ready to revisit what you cranked out last year.

For now, though, I'm stuck with this year's So-Called Novel. And now that I've crested the halfway point, I'm hoping it's a downhill coast from here.

Word count: 25,041 (halfway = woo-hoo!)

Last line: More than finding Paul himself, Alexa wanted to find what he'd hidden from her: not exactly his heart, but the mysterious contents of those pilfered manuscript pages.