Here goes nothing!

So, at 12:00am NaNoWriMo officially started. I stayed up late to get a few words logged before bed last night. Unsurprisingly, the NaNo website was swamped, and barely functioning! That's a good thing, because it meant less time wasted on the very active NaNo forums, and more time writing actual words. It's now 11:47, and I am already up to 1,272 words. (and even got some school done! We are getting ready to finish up, now.) That's pretty good - the gold standard daily quota is 1,667 words per day to reach 50,000 by month's end.

That said, if I were to be killed in a car wreck today, I would be mortified for anyone to read those 1200 words! (And, trust me, me dying is the only way anyone will. Otherwise, I'd die of embarrassment anyway, so let's not go there.) The standard approach in NaNo is NOT TO EDIT. That is virtually impossible for me, but so far I've limited myself to correcting typos, and fixing things if I change tacts mid-paragraph. I've highlighted a bunch of stuff that I want to delete later. I keep promising myself that in December I can come back and change and tweak and polish to my heart's content.

But November is about getting something down first, so I have something to edit in the first place.

I'll be interested to see how successful I can be at not editing as I go. I usually type in an extremely non-linear way, and even my emails and blog posts are polished continually as I go. I'm almost obsessive about it. I can easily spend an hour on one email, by accident. So this is a great exercise for me - a whole different way of approaching things. We'll see how it goes!

My agreement with myself is to post at least a word count update every day in November. Even if I don't get any writing done. That's a great incentive to keep on track, I think. So check back daily to see how I do. The drama, it is exciting!!!