I noticed the NaNo calendar just now - it has Monday on red (it's only 10:30 A.M.), Sunday is yellow (so between 'yes' and 'no' that must mean 'maybe') and Saturday nicely green. What rubbish. Yesterday my word count was 31,490, and I missed the 1667 words per day target by only two hundred words. The day before that, I wrote something like 5000 words, working ahead, as it were. My daily target-to-make-it has dropped to below 1000 words. But the calendar doesn't agree. Just like it doesn't seem to get that it's still Monday morning. Why does that bug me?
I've worked ahead for this weekend, because it was my birthday and I had two days of visitors to look forward to. I figured I wouldn't get much work done, so I worked ahead. And I'm immensely proud that as of this morning I've reached over 34,000 words. It's just that that calendar with yesterday on the expected red, still looks like a fail grade. I'm a little silly that way, I guess.
How's my story coming along? Fine. I'm progressing steadily and sometimes I have to stop myself in a dialogue and wonder where it's going. It's so easy to write conversations that you sometimes forget the conversation should have a point, otherwise it's just marked for future deletion. Even so, my characters are easy talkers and you don't want a conversation about nothing, but just about as much you don't want a conversation where they tell each other everything that needs to be revealed right about now in three dense paragraphs each.
I like how I notice now that there are things I'll probably want to change once I get into some sort of editing stage. And I love how my inner editor is biding her time, knowing it might be months before we get to do any proper revising. I've also noticed that I've set up small traces at the beginning of the tale - subtle hints as to one person's dark identity and another's nice side - that seem to have watered down or gotten lost along the way. I might have to fix that too.
The thing is, my tale has become far less supernatural that I thought it would. Can't say it wasn't the intention, because I was already trying to figure out how to make it less like the staple YA diet with all the paranormal stuff anyway. So that's something that goes on the Tweaking To Do list for later.
Still, I'm writing now in broader lines than in the beginning. I was very detailed, trying to convey as much as I could about subtleties and such. Right now, there's been a shift. I want to finish putting down the bare bones of the tale, which will undoubtedly take me past 50K. But I need to do it soon, because I have work waiting (stuff I actually get paid for) with deadlines that won't budge. Which means, my NaNo isn't going to end on November 30th, but much much sooner. I just hope I can finish the tale at whatever word count, so that when I leave it untouched for a while, it won't miss anything that's important to its structure. Like the end.