Sunday - NaNoWriMo half time report

 A couple of days ago I stalled rather horrendously on No Man's Land - my bawdy science fiction detective story. You see, I had about 80% of the novel down in my head and scribbled into my notebooks when I set out writing three weeks ago (yes scary that - three weeks).

In those three weeks I have taken the novel from not actually existing to 54,319 words. Or as the more observant amongst you have noticed I have achieved the 50K target in three weeks. The only problem is that the first week and a day of those three weeks were still in October. Those eight days saw a mad frenzy of writing which resulted in 27,437 words before the official period had started.

80% is more than I normally have when I start writing. If I have the characters down and the rough plot (start, couple of key points along the way, ending) then I'm happy to go for it. My brain usually fills in the blanks along the way. This time however it hasn't.

I still have the ending done, it's just that I do not have the faintest idea of how to get there. Or, to put it another way, bugger. Halfway through NaNoWriMo and I'm at a standstill. So I sis the only thing I could in a situation like that. I closed the Word document and left it alone.

I did do a couple of productive things with the time I had - or rather five things; those being submissions of the YA fantasy novel to agencies. Yeah, I might have to admit to having pretty much gone against what I said and revised the darn thing. It's the kind of thing you do when you are stymied with the current WIP. I have maybe another couple of days to merge the changes into the  master file and the Patternmaker's Daughter is off to the test readers. I am an impetuous idiot.

Which leads to the next question - that of what to write next. I still want to make the 50K of original fiction during November, I just feel it will have to be split across two separate projects. And if I'm on something a little more friendly to the brain cells I might actually find getting there easier. Because when I look back over this blog I see that 7,000 words in a single day happened more than once with the PMD. Yet the most I've managed with No Man's Land was 4,500.

Of course this might all change if I wake up tomorrow with the bridging bit of the plot in my head.

But I do have other options. I have been toying with a YA contemporary supernatural story set in Leicestershire (strangely where I live), a very English paranormal investigations story, another Ben Williamson novella and about a dozen other things so there are stories aplenty to be told. I just need to settle on one and get writing.

Let's see what tomorrow brings.

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