Four days into NaNoWriMo, and my word count stands at almost 8,000 words, nicely above the official goal of 6,668.  But I haven’t had a really rough day for finding writing time (or inspiration) yet, and I know at least the first issue is coming soon.  Tomorrow, in fact, when I have a work event in the evening, so I’ve been building up a cushion consciously.

And I’ve mostly done it with Word Sprints.  They’re a thing in the NaNo world–taking a set amount of time to write as much as you can.  No distractions, no wandering off to check the NaNo forums, just write as many words as you can until the time is up.  I like 15-Minute Word Sprints, and I literally set the timer on my phone.  Something about the timer makes it feel official, and I do better at sticking to it.  And I always check my word count afterwards, to see how it went.

I have to say, it makes such a difference trying to write in a set period of time.  If I have an hour, I can easily find myself writing a few sentences, drifting off to something else, drifting back to the writing eventually, drifting away again…you get the idea.  But if I take it in 15 minute chunks, I’ve been averaging about 400 words per sprint.  And I like it especially because it’s not (too) hard to fit 15 minutes in before work, on my lunch hour, into the evening…it gets words written in short periods of time, and that’s a big win.

And not just random words–in that almost 8,000 words I’ve introduced three major characters, explained the concept of Observing and even traveling into other universes, crash-landed one spaceship, invented several alien species names (just don’t ask me for details about said-aliens) and dropped in a reference to Shakespeare.  Because if I feel confident about anything being true of the galaxy of 2,000 years from now, it’s that we will all still be reading Shakespeare.  🙂

Now, have an excerpt, from a scene with my two major Terran characters.

“Come on, let’s see if we can find another pirate coat.” Lark handed the leather coat off to Aza and went burrowing into the depths of the tightly-packed racks of clothes.

Come on, let’s… Aza wondered how many times Lark had said that to her over the years. She folded the coat over one arm and flicked through the clothes hanging on the outer edges of the stall. ‘Come on, let’s’ usually got her into the kind of trouble she never would have found on her own. But it was always worth it.

Today is my fifth “blogiversary,” the fifth anniversary of my blog. It’s a cliché, but it does go by really fast…  I mentioned a lot of statistics recently for my 1,000^th post, so I won’t repeat myself today. But I will say thank you again for reading!

As always happens, my blogiversary coincides with the opening day of NaNoWriMo.  Or, in the non-abbreviated form, National Novel Writing Month, when thousands of writers set out to write 50,000 words of a novel during the month of November.

This is my fourth year participating, and I honestly plan my writing for the entire year around NaNoWriMo—so I’m pretty excited! I always love taking a month to really focus on my writing. (More than usual, I mean!) And I’ve had good results—my published Storyteller and Her Sisters started out as my first NaNoWriMo novel, and (if all goes well!) last year’s NaNo novel will be published next fall.  Like I’ve done before, I’ll be blogging throughout the month about how the writing is going.

I decided to branch away from my fairy tale series this year, and dive into science fiction instead. I don’t have a title yet, so I’ve been calling it my Multiverse Novel…because the plan (though we’ll see how it goes!) is to explore how one person’s life can change based on different choices, by exploring through different parallel universes. Also there’s a quest involved, a possible conspiracy, and a good number of bizarre alien species.

There will still be humor and I think there may still be some connections to fairy tales too…as part of that quest I mentioned.

I started writing yesterday…but I won’t be counting those 1,500 words towards my NaNo total. My larger goal is to complete a 75,000 word novel by the end of December, so I hated to let a Saturday go by without getting a start.

And as for the official start today on November 1, I started the day running with some morning writing, then met with a few writer friends in the afternoon to write together.  End of day total is 2,063 words, nicely above the 1,667 goal.  Not every day will be that good, so I like to start the month strong and get at least a little cushion in there (because it can wipe out SO fast).

So it was a good opening day!  I like to post excerpts from my NaNo writing, and today you get two.  My opening paragraph, which I actually wrote a few weeks ago:

In a near-infinity of universes, Aza’s ship never came to my planet. In four, it crashed. In only one did it set down safely for repairs. This is a story of that universe.

And a bit from today, from my alien narrator observing her first humans:

That left only the last member of the group, who was standing a pace removed from the rest. Another female, and a little smaller. Possibly younger than the others? She had longer hair—if it really was hair. For just a moment I thought she might be a different species after all because she seemed to have thin tendrils growing from her head. Then I looked closer and realized they were tiny braids. How interesting. If Terrans did have control over the make-up, length or arrangement of their hair, perhaps they considered it as one of their forms of self-expression.

I vaguely remembered from my history lessons that there had been a similar fad for a brief period among my own people a few centuries ago. It seemed like it would be such a lot of work to make decisions around. Putting my hair into its braid every morning, and trimming it twice a year, required no significant cognitive energy at all.