For the first time doing NaNoWriMo,I actually kept above the target word count for the first week. … Then my husband’s birthday hit. We enjoyed his birthday together, then hosted a party the next day for friends, which required plenty of cooking and cleaning. The following day he woke up sick, so I corralled the kids for church and after that we all kinda collapsed on the couch. We did finally get to watch Toy Story 4 (which I didn’t like a much as I’d hoped). Monday was a day off school, and my kids were still feeling exhausted and grumpy, so again we didn’t do much. At some point during all this, either I ate something I shouldn’t have or the stress of the weekend got to me, and I had overwhelming exhaustion and foggy brain. It was really impossible to write coherently, even though I knew what I wanted to say. Thankfully, by Tuesday morning, I was feeling more like myself, so I was able to get the daily word target – now I just need to overwrite for a few days in order to catch up.
In terms of what I’m writing, short stories have proven to be quite different than writing a novel during NaNoWriMo. I’m finding I’m needing to get into the story flow much faster and develop my characters and their relationships much faster than I generally do with a novel – otherwise, I won’t know who’s in my story before it’s finished! The benefit is that if I’m stuck, I can just work on a different short story while I think through the prior one. With a novel, I was never one to jump scenes – because I never plot things out, if I jump a scene, I have no idea how I got there plot wise. On the negative side, I miss delving deeply into the character personalities and seeing how they interact with each other and with the situations thrown at them.
