At twenty-seven, YouTube sensation Ben Leonards is married to his work. If he's not whipping up lasagna with a side of science experiments, he's running statistical analysis of bitcoin during explosive behavior periods.
When a friend asks him to org...
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My average fiction word count before NaNoWriMo hovered around 12,000 words a month. I was editing on top of that and wrote non-fiction for work, the non-profit I volunteer at, and Toastmaster projects, but I doubt I went over 20,000 words a month with all that included. I'm at 28,719 words on day fifteen of NaNoWriMo, and the only writing I dropped the ball on is editing. I had to set that aside.
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My shoulders need a massage, I haven't eaten so many prepackaged meals since college, the only exercise has been the occasional walks, and both my dishes and my laundry are suffering from abandonment issues.
Friday, November 13th, was the worst day so far because of re-reading the chapters I wrote and finding everything wrong with them. Won't be doing that again (re-reading the chapters I wrote, that is—finding everything wrong with what I write isn't going anywhere). I wrote 294 words that day.
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I've been careful giving myself small rewards throughout to keep the motivation going and have something to look forward to. And I've written almost 30,000 words in fifteen days—how awsomeis that. It's nearly halfway to the end of the book, as I'm aiming for 70,000 words (35 chapters) with this one. I might finish this first draft by the end of the year (lofty goals here) and I'm exhilarated to have reached this point. It took me eight months to finish the first draft of 'Love Novice'.
I had a major writer's high on Tuesday, November 10th, and it was one of the best feelings. I also had a breakthrough and wrote the ending, which is a first for me (I'm a linear writer), but it's given me a clear vision of where I want the characters to end up.
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Why am I boring you with the minutiae of my NaNoWriMo challenge?
Your experience as readers might change because I'll be cranking up the internal dialogue on both Ben and Amelie's POVs, but especially Ben. As there wasn't much of that in the chapters so far, this may feel inconsistent with the character. My request is for you to stay with the story and allow me to experiment (that's one of the reasons I'm doing NaNoWriMo).
And, please, let me know what you think of the heavier inner monologue.
If you, the readers, and my inner critic agree that it's a better approach—I'll beef up the chapters I have up to this point when I'm editing and bring in more internal dialogue there. In case this experiment fails, and more internal monologue's not the way to go for these two characters, I'll strip it and assume the current format works best.
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Thank you for being my alpha readers. I hope you enjoy getting back to Ben, Amelie, and their friends as I play around with words to make their story as vivid and binge-worthy as possible.
P.S. I should be posting another chapter later on today too, so this is NOT me cheating you out of more of the novel.
