After a trickle of words on Day 7, work came to a stop with nothing at all written on Day 8 and 9. In fact, what I just wrote here is more than I have written for the past 48 hours on the story.
There are a few issues. Here they are:
- Although I had a better plan this time than I did during NaNoWriMo 2015, it still wasn’t a very detailed plan. It was less a map and more a series of scratches on tree bark that had then been assaulted by a ravenous woodpecker.
- I opted to use some real life settings and people as templates, intending to blend/merge and refine these things on a subsequent rewrite to make them more genuine composites rather than thinly-disguised stand-ins. But I went so all-in on this that a rewrite would be a challenge at best and a lot of work to make the reality more fictional. Too much work, possibly. In other words, I kind of screwed up.
- My efforts to write at lunch have been stymied by distractions. I’ll probably move future writing there from the staff lounge, which can be loud and prone to interruptions, to one of the designated quiet areas of the library, which are prone to silence because very few people want to occupy areas that are truly silent, even in a library.
Mainly though, my plan is lacking form and shape and what I’ve written feels like warmed over work-based fanfic than an actual piece of fiction. I haven’t decided what to do yet but come tomorrow (Monday) I’ll move forward with…something.
