NaNoWriMo Day 4

New words: 1,981
Total words: 8,793
Goal: 50,000

8793 / 50000
(17.59%)

Quote-worthy snippet:

He was just a guy Nathan ran into in a club. All tattoos and piercings, with a couple clones at either shoulder giving Nathan looks that bore right through and beyond him.

Interesting words used: grumbling buses. I’ve used that phrase before, because they really *do* grumble.

I’m still borrowing from pre-November writing, when it’s relevant. Sometimes, it’s to rewrite it, until half the words have changed. I don’t know if that counts as “new writing” or not. But see, in thinking over this story and the parts of it I’ve been unhappy with, I changed a couple key points of my mythology. And now I find it fruitful to go back over scenes I’ve written in the past to see how they change if the story-facts are/canon is/mythology is different than it was when I originally wrote those scenes. And that, in turn, leads to more writing with totally new words, because it throws everything I thought that scene was about on its ear.

It’s all fluid right now, my story, in a way it wasn’t last week. Knowing everything I’m doing in November is just something I’m doing for November that will be over in the space of thirty days is allowing me to be experimental. I always had trouble with that before–writing the same scene or the same sentence half a dozen ways to decide which I liked best. If that created a major fork in what I thought the plot was or the mythology was or who a character was, I felt like I was veering off-track, or that I was just scattered and not focused. But now, for a month, I have permission to go as off-track as I want, in as many contradictory directions as I want, because I know exactly when it will be over, and I can roll the whole story back to the way it was.

Or, you know, keep the best and throw away the rest.