Week Three came and went so fast I hardly believe it. This week I decided to put my reading on hold till December 1st. I can write more on my iPhone going to and from work that way. And I think it's helped.
Something else that helped was the last two Saturdays. From 9am till 8pm I wrote my heart out, taking an hour break here and there along the way. This Saturday was by far the best I've had, I wrote 6,571 words in total. Allow me to share stats to you that I STILL am finding pretty unbelievable:
Day 7: 4,325 words written
Day 14: 8,077 words written
Day 21: 22,716 words written
TODAY: 31,236 words written!
Just seeing how far I've come from that first week. Actually, how far I've come from the first two weeks where I was a bit erratic with my writing. Next year I'm going to start the month strong by making sure no reading takes place in the month of November.
This third week I learned that even though I was WAY behind the whole time, I caught up to being within 9,000 words of where I essentially should be today, which is at the 40K mark. I had great friends encouraging me both in the NaNoWriMo world that I met through tweeting and in my life personally.
I started with an outline that I never ended up using. I wrote down character profiles for each main character that I never ended up following. I even made up names for every possible person I would encounter, but as you might have guessed, I never used them either. Turns out everyone really is different with how they write. I thought I would need to be a "by the book" kind of writer, following all the rules and tricks of the trade that other writers have used and later become the successful successes.
I've learned, the hard way, that there is no right or wrong way to writing a novel. I will take this bit of knowledge and use it towards my next novel and my next one and my next one. Remember, after you've written it, the REALLY hard part begins. I have done NO editing whatsoever. Not going back to fix blatantly obvious mistakes has been something else I learned this week. And boy have I made some really eye cringing mistakes. But I made a note of them and kept on writing. There will be plenty of time to edit. This is not to hone your editing skills, this is to train yourself to simply write it all down and edit later. I will update with how the editing process goes for me from December - February, which is how long I'm giving myself to do any additions, rewrites, edits, etc.
My writing days are far from over. How exciting!
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