NaNoWriMo 2017 Update #2

A couple of days ago I got this HUGE burst of competitive writing energy because a friend of mine who is also doing NaNoWriMo has been consistently ahead of me by just a thousand or so words all month and I was finally like, "Enough is enough!" So yesterday I wrote 5,000 words to catch up by a couple of days and surpass her, and I am very proud of myself for now being ahead of her for once! I'm the one who wants to write for a living. Behind behind so much for so long was just sad. But no more!

I'm now finally in the middle of the story, after having passed the 25k mark yesterday during my crazy burst of inspiration, except now I've come to a point where I think I'm a little confused as to what the actual plotline is that I'm following, so most of my writing today has been one of my characters kind of figuring that out for me kinda sorta maybe. I don't know. We'll see. But this alternate-chapters thing has suddenly become difficult where it used to be super easy for the first ten days of this month. (Cale and Amber's chapters finally synced up, by the way - all on their own!) Here's hoping I can pull through and figure things out in time for my characters to start dominating the 30,000s and beyond this Thanksgiving week!

I am determined to stay ahead of my friend from now on. You don't even understand how upsetting it was to be behind someone who hasn't spent her whole life learning how to be a good writer.

I am currently at 27,203 words.

NaNoWriMo 2017 Update #1

I'm pretty sure I've not been this far behind this early on in NaNoWriMo before (with the obvious exception of the year I didn't win), but it's only 7k words. Compared to the 25k I was behind two years ago, I'm SO not worried about it. I'll catch up, no problem. Especially once the story really starts to get underway.

So far I'm still kind of in the beginning stages of Follow the Raven (again), so the story hasn't exactly picked up yet. It's been kind of interesting to switch from the third person in every other version of this story to first person in this current rewrite, because in some ways it's easier and in other ways it's hard to keep up because Cale and Amber started telling their sides of the story at different points in time. So right now Cale is actually talking about what happened before she met Amber while Amber is talking about how she met Cale and what became of that. It's different, but I'm kind of liking it. (Also I've become a master at secret noveling, which is something I've never done before. Most of the writing I did this week was done at work when I had a few spare minutes here and there. My average is 800 words a night. Shh!)

In other news, I'm really stressed about my reading right now because WHY did I think it would be okay for me to go into NaNoWriMo while still in the middle of three books?! I'm almost done with two of them, and I think finishing them will help immensely, but still. WHAT have I done. Help meeeee. I sincerely hope that by the next update I'll only be reading one or maybe two at the same time, because I cannot continue to handle all this stress. XD

I am currently at 8,018 words.