NaNoWriMo Day 15 — Ohhhh we’re halfway there!

by Crystal Paradis-Catanzaro
by Crystal Paradis-Catanzaro

Ohhhh–oooohhh! Livin’ on a prayer! Take my hand and we’ll make it I swear…
Ahem.

Halfway through November. I’m creeping up on 24,000 words, and am fully confident that by today’s end I will have hit 25,000 words! I’m currently clacking away at the Portsmouth Public Library, where in just over an hour Hallie Ephron will be motivating me and giving me tips and inspiration in a talk entitled “How to Write FAST without Losing Your Compass.” And as luck would have it, I am literally navigating in the particular part of the story I’m in right now (well, not including any of the number of flashbacks I tangentially explore with startling frequency).

In a rebellious act of overt procrastination, I headed my dallying self over to Wordle.net early on in my Write-In stint to make a word cloud of my novel thus far. Here it is:

Pretty cool, huh? Apparently the most used words are pretty boring ones, but that’s not very surprising. I’m happy that “Batman” at least makes an appearance in an otherwise misleadingly mundane word cloud. No really, I promise, my novel is actually quite exciting! It’s no work of Dostoyevsky or anything, but it’s NaNoWriMo, it’s not actually supposed to be good yet. This is an epic exercise in first drafting– getting words onto the paper. The toughest part for me has been refraining from editing as I go. I LOVE editing. It’s my favorite part of writing– the crafting of language into something that sounds just so amazing. But the vomiting of ideas onto paper (or screen, as it were) is the necessary first step. Cleaning it up as I go would ensure a failure in hitting 50,000 by 11:59pm on the 30th. So onwards I go, with “Permission to suck,” one of NaNoWriMo’s slogans, repeating in my head.
I had a pretty exciting element introduced into the story this evening… one word: moustache. I can’t WAIT to flesh out THIS part of the story! Yay! :})

Crystal Paradis-Catanzaro is a strategic communications professional, working to advance social impact in local communities. She is a micro-homesteader, queer advocate and feminist birder.