Nano Day 11 - um - day 1?

OK, on October 31st, I signed up for that totally maniacal and obsessive November event, NaNoWriMo. For those of you non-writers who don't know what that means, it stands for National Novel Writing Month. It's a commitment to write 50,000 words during the thirty days of November.

The problem is, I'm a huge procrastinator. I often find a reason to do something else instead of doing what maybe I should be doing. Sometimes, though, there's a need that drives a person to where the decision finally has to be made to do what has to be done.

In other words, I've put off my writing for way too long, so long that I have this kind of dull ache deep inside that begs to be relieved. The remedy is to pull my long neglected novel up from the depths of my computer files, scan through the 100K+ words I already have written, and take it from there. 

Yeah, 100K is a lot for an unfinished novel, but much of it is rewrites of the same scene or even scenes I know will eventually be cut altogether. I got so tired of searching dozens of files with names like Chapter One (second) or rewrite of Chapter Four or rewrite of Chapter Six scene after Crit Group comments. You get the idea.

So, last night, I stayed up later than I should have, scanning through my 415 page document so I could "sleep" on how to advance the story today.

Finally, after church and spending some quality time with our daughter and granddaughter, I settled down and started writing.  It was slow going because I kept referring back to scenes and refreshing my memory of character names, but I did manage to get 1049 words on paper. 

Not a lot, but it's a start.  I'll do more tomorrow (maybe even later tonight if I can't sleep). Will I make 50,000 words by November 30th? Highly unlikely.  Yet, over the next twenty days of this challenge that remain, I'll do my best to peck the computer keys enough to rack up 20,000 words. 

Maybe I'll only hit 10,000. Still, that will be 10,000 more words than  I have today.

And the ache is starting to ease - a little.