NaNo Gone Bad

You may have noticed I, er, didn't hit the 30,000-word target by Sunday night like I was aiming for. Yeah, you're not half as disappointed as I....

See, here's the deal. Remember, I'm writing this thing on the fly. I have a premise and that's about it. Around day four, I figured out the first turning point, and wrote toward that.

Now, I'm there, and I don't have a clue where to go next. Ah, the drawbacks to not having a plan. Especially when your goal is to write as much and as fast as you can.

Kinda hard when you have nothing to write.

The idea is to forge ahead anyway, with the hope that somehow you'll stumble out of the abyss and discover a new treasure trove of ideas. The danger there, in my opinion, is the possibility (probability?) that you waste a whole lot of time either a) writing yourself into a corner from which it's impossible to recover, or b) creating a whole lotta crap. I live in fear that I'll doom a reasonably good start by making such a mess I'll just wanna chuck the whole thing (see NaNoWriMo project circa 2003).

That evil wench, Jax, who continues to rack up the words with abandon, gave me a couple of ideas to put the ball back in motion.

If you see that bar start creeping toward the right again, you'll know one of 'em worked.