Day Four

Perhaps I should be posting every day how I feel about the process of writing a novel in 30 days, but I have a feeling it's going to be way too repetitious. So, perhaps an update every few days or when something is changing, or it simply occurs to me would suffice.

Four days in and I have to say, it's going really well! I already told you that day one was great, it was actually more than I had expected. The second day I attended my first "Write In". I had imagined this was going to consist of several like-minded writers banging away at their laptops, feeding off of each other's creative energy. What it was, for me at least, was very distracting. I'm finding that I really have to have very little noise around me in order to hear what the story is, what my characters were saying. I need to dive in, submerge, and come up for air only when I need to. This paddling and splashing around on the surface was frustrating for me. I applaud those that can write that way, I just don't think I'm one of them. That day I wrote a scene, consisting of 1,800 or so words. So it was still productive, but I felt a bit disconnected from what I was doing.

Day Three held a different kind of activity, entailing moving my mom into her new house. This was an all day event, with my husband, my son and two of his friends helping. I think I can speak for all of us when I say that by 5pm that night, we were all exhausted, sore, but felt immensely satisfied. Anyway, I was super tired so I took the day off.

Today, Sunday and Day Four, went really well. Here's the thing. I wrote a scene which dug a little deeper into my characters, giving the reader (assuming at some point someone other than me will read this) some more background and idea of who these people are. Then I took a break to find a way to watch the Walking Dead.

I know this has nothing to do with writing a novel, but I'm determined to find a way to watch that group of survivors meet up in this new prison place and battle zombies and human nature. I do not miss having regular TV at all. We have NBC and a couple others, so I'll watch something from time to time, but I really don't care about TV. I do care about these dang survivors and their stories. It's really irritating to me that I can't stream the episodes on AMC's website, watch them on Hulu or Hulu Plus, or rent them from Amazon without buying "Prime" service, which is about $100. I thought I'd bite the bullet and buy the episodes on ITunes, but the stinkin' HDMI cable that I bought doesn't want to work. We hooked up the Mac with a regular monitor cable and an auxiliary cord, but all of the episodes are in HD and the monitor cable can't handle it. So, I'm frustrated. Is it too much to ask for a good show to be watched in some normal fashion on the new fangled TVs without having to fork out $100 plus $3.00 an episode? For cryin' out loud.

But I digress. After dinner I headed up to the Upstairs Office and wrote the next scene. I think it's pretty good, showing areas of future regret for my main character as well as some decent foreshadowing. The next scene is where I have to kill off a bus load of teenagers. In a way, I'm really excited to write that! In another way, I'm a bit terrified I'm not going to do the scene justice. It's the inciting incident in my story line and if it's not done well, that would.... well, it would suck.

However, I'll remind myself that this is a first draft and I can go back later and revisit the fatal bus scene and make it scarier or more vivid. Tomorrow night is another Write In. This one is at a different location and I'm tempted to give it a shot, maybe it will be better this time. But considering I have to kill 60 or so people tomorrow, I might want to do that in the privacy of my own home. I'm not sure how I'm going to react. ;)

Total November Word Count at the end of Day Four: 7,640
Words to go to hit 50,000 goal: 42,360