(say yes say yes say yes say yes)

. Well, they would still count if I hadn't just deleted them. I was going all wrong and had to remove a scene.

A trick I liked from the NaNo site: when you get to a scene that needs deleting, just put it in italic. If you change your mind, it's still there; if you don't, it still counts toward your 50,000.

Dear fellow-NaNoers:

Never, ever look at the list of people in Authors. Because the first 500 people whose names contain the letter "B" have all written many, many more words than I have. And I clicked on a couple of their excerpts, and I wasn't able to say "Well, if I wrote like that, I'd have 20,000 words, too."

This is not a race. Make it into a race, and I will only depress myself. More.

Update:

I'm less worried about it than I was. 6,900 words now and the beginnings of a story I actually think I like. I seriously doubt I'll make anything like 50k words by the end of November, but that I'm working on it, and writing, and plan to keep on writing, those are the good things. I may just end up with a novel when this is all done.

I'm now tempted to look at the authors.

Not gonna do it. This is not about them. Besides, in my head, except for you, they all suck and have stupid hair.(Not hard to imagine if you visit the forums, she said, cattily.)

Deborah, have you always worked the way you do now? If you were, like Meg, somebody with youngish children, do you think you'd still work that way?

The way Meg works sounds very much like all the advice I got when I was in graduate school about writing your thesis -- the set schedule -- writing for either a particular period of time or for a particular amount of work done. This didn't really work for me, but I know people who swear by it.

Sometimes I do that. Say I need to finish a page, or write a hundred words or something.Cause I need to learn to stay with stuff.

Deborah, have you always worked the way you do now?

Yup. I started writing and publishing the first batch in the late eighties; Jo was born in 1979. I wrote my first 3.5 novels at work, managing a two-city banking regulatory law firm; I'd get in early, start writing, hand stuff off to my secretary (whose mama is a famous and worldclass poet, so she understood), get a shitload of real work done, and just write as it hit. I wrote very little of it at home, but when I did, parenting wasn't an issue.

And never an outline. I have a huge respect for people who can put dots on a page and then connect them, but I'm the same woman who did a painting which hangs in my kitchen. Started out as a pretty landscape, seeing if I could do it with wet on wet. The original idea was mountain and treetops, an exercise in perspective. The finished product has the trees and the mountain, but jutting out of the middle is a stone monolith with a steaming mug atop it. The painting is called "Java of the Gods."

Me and preplanned? Tricky. Very very tricky.

I do think that if one is scattered and random by nature, not a reliable self-starter and natural procrastinator, getting one's backside into the desk chair for a certain period of time each day is a good way to be handy should the muse wander by. I'd use the time to edit, or clean out files, look over the previous day's work, pay bills, anything to keep me in the chair for two hours, minimum. Usually something would happen. It would often be haring off down a false scent, but sometimes it turned into four to six hours of intense writing, much of which was keeper quality.

I had an ending in mind when I started, and a number of events that had to happen along the way. I got blocked, and the only thing that got me past it was writing out points that had to occur, in order, to get from one major plot point to the next. What had been blocking me was a jumbled order, so in this instance, an outline actually helped. But connecting the dots was the adventure for me, because the dots were very widely spaced, and everything that happened in between them was the writing part, the fun part, where unexpected things happened and my characters developed their own personalities and managed to surprise me by becoming more than the one-dimensional character sketches I'd started out with.

Hewing to a detailed outline would never have been possible, but I needed some direction down in the jungly valley when I couldn't see which way to go.

I do think that if one is scattered and random by nature, not a reliable self-starter and natural procrastinator, getting one's backside into the desk chair for a certain period of time each day is a good way to be handy should the muse wander by.

Totally. I'm just outside that box, and I'm very much in the minority, if the writers I know are at all representative. I just sit and write. My stops have never been for blocks; they've generally been for research, or reconsidering a character's headspace, or something like that.

And direction is very much our friend.