How's NaNo Going?

- NaNo = NaNoWriMo = National Novel Writing Month = Write 50,000 words in November.

- My NaNo diet has two extremes: 1) I eat 3,000 calories of candy corn, 2) the only thing I eat all day is a can of tuna.

- It's Monday, November 11, 7:15pm as I'm drafting this. I can't even tell you how much I don't want to crank out 1,667 words right now. In fact, I'm avoiding it so hard that I'm blogging here instead.

- There is clean laundry from four days ago that I haven't folded.

- Sometimes I try to write on the couch while Gabe plays video games with his headphones one, but I get distracted by the flashing lights and pictures, so I put on a baseball cap and pull it really far down so that I can't see.

- My Google search history is getting very “serial killer” lately. In the past couple of days, I’ve looked up “face burn scar,” “how long take die of burning,” “punch head unconscious,” and “do mermaids lay eggs” (which is actually thanks to Disney+/The Little Mermaid, not NaNo).

- During NaNo, I pay closer attention to how I read. I am one of those people who sees a chunk of description tucked between paragraphs of dialogue and immediately skip the description, only reading the dialogue. As a writer, I'm offended at my own self. However, as a reader, it's making me write less useless description. I find that even with skipping descriptions, I never feel like I'm wandering around in the dark. My mind supplies what it need to "see" the story. You say "sparse bedroom" and I'm fine; I don't need to know the color of the walls or how many pieces of furniture are in there or any number of other details I'm tempted to bludgeon my readers with. (Of course, for the sake of #WordCount, I may leave some in for now XD)

- I was so preoccupied today (Saturday, November 16) that I started making lunch, including frying meat and making rice, only to notice that it was actually only 10:26am.

- Last Saturday I retrieved the "original" (fourth draft, but still VERY close to the original original) Fire Fairy Story from my room at my parents' house. Reading it now, 30,000+ words into my latest rewrite, feels weird. It feels kind of like reading the book (the original version of the FF story) after seeing the movie (the years-removed version I'm currently writing). I keep face-palming like, "Oh. THAT'S why he/she/they did that. That makes way more sense than the contrived, garbage explanation I've shoe-horned in now." There's something really beautiful and transparent and helpful about the early version that I believe will help me write the final version one day.

- Last Saturday I also went to bed the angriest I've been in a long time.

"What's wrong?" Gabe asked.

"It's my characters," I said, trying not to swear or cry. "I don't know WHY he said that. It literally makes no sense. I can't connect the dots. What's his problem?!"

"Can I help?"

"I don't know. Here's what happened. They were playing Counsel [a Furierite game] and Coal revealed something really harmful about Flare. Out of NOWHERE. Why would he do that?! And then Ember revealed something about him to get even, and he just denied it and got away with it."

Gabe thought for a few moments. "It sounds like he really hates that game."

"Oh," I said softly, anger melting. "You're right. He would hate that game. It's making a mockery of everything he stands for." Tears of relief prickled my nose. "Thank you."

Writers out there: Get you a Gabe.

~ Stephanie

P.S. 35,301 words.