My nanowrimo journey continues...

A brief recap - Nanowrimo is national novel writing month. 30 days of literary abandon designed to get you to write a 50,000 word novel. It's free, fun and incredibly challenging.

Week 1 - It's a few days in and I've managed to not only keep up with my daily word goal but surpass it slighty every day. Yesterday for example I wrote a whole extra hundred and fourteen words. Which doesn't seem like a lot, but when you force yourself to write 1667 words every day, any extra that you can stretch out is like icing on your literary cake.

Last year I wrote a novel set in medieval times with sorcerers, dragons, grog and mead. But for this year's literary adventure I decided wanted something a little more modern and since my attention span for non-fiction literature is next to nothing, I started writing a novel about spies. Spies with super powers. :)

It's funny what happens when you start out an on epic writing journey. You excitedly type out the beginning of your novel, everything is new: the characters, setting and even the plot. There's a vague idea or a detailed plan in your head of where everything is going to go, what's going to happen, who's going to die from a mysterious shovel related death and who's going to fall in love. But as you actually start to write it things seem to change randomly without you knowing about it. For instance, last night I had a little epiphany. My main character who's point of view I have been writing from for over 10,000 words is not in fact the centre of my novel universe. Her new friend Temperance is. That little discovery made me want to jump up and down in excitement and cry big salty tears. On the one hand my novel seemed to have new life but on the other I had spent over 10,000 words writing in the wrong direction.

But nanowrimo isn't about going back to the beginning and starting over (thank god), it's about powering on until the end because the only way to get to the end of your novel is through it. So today I'm going to write from Temperance's point of view, flush out her background and maybe put in some interesting dialogue about how she got her special spy code name.

Stay tuned, an update of week 2 is coming soon...

--Heather