Day one of the NaNoWriMo has begun and is almost over. In exactly two minutes as I am typing this. For a first day, I didn't do so bad, scoring 2338 words and what I believe is a decend draft first chapter. I have a few ideas of where I might be headed - note the doubt in my voice - but I've already learnt two important lessons...

The first: Don't leave 'little things' to the last minute, because they irk the living daylights out of you and suddenly you want to, no need to get them done before you can possibly continue writing. In my case: there was an old cardboard box of books that my mother found while cleaning house, and it's been sitting in my bedroom for about three weeks now.

I always update my Excel sheet of books with all the titles I buy, so that I can look up what I have whenever I feel like it. So leaving these books unattended all this time was something I could excuse only because I was working so hard on my translation. But now it started to bother me, as I had a few new books piling up on top of it - mostly for my son - and I bought some books yesterday, which also needed to be entered into the system... suffice it to say, I've procrastinated tonight, however useful.

Still, for today I did make the target of 1667 words and then some, so I'm not entirely frustrated. Which brings me to lesson number two: Even if I have a vague idea of where this so-called novel might be going, I'm starting to realise it isn't as easy as sitting down behind the laptop and typing my heart out. I need to have some sort of plan, even if it's just flimsy. I need a sketch of a certain number of chapters and what will happen whereabouts in the tale. Otherwise, I'll be staring at the screen a lot, or get bogged down in the daily details of my character's life which will eventually end up on the cutting room floor.

Tomorrow I hope I can both make some sort of plot plan and chapter outline and write the required number of words. I'm secretly hoping to write more than the target per day, so that I can have weekends off if that so happens to be a good idea - considering there's a lot of other stuff I really do have to do as well.