NaNoWriMo 2011 - Progress Report!

Current day: 10

Word Count/end of day 9:  15,287.

Hello from NaNoWriMo!

After a whole two years of my participation in NaNoWriMo resulting in a grand total of ZERO words, I'm really surprising myself this year by sticking with it, and finding out that writing is actually fun. Who knew!

Before I embarked on NaNoWriMo I had a couple of concerns. While I knew that ideas wouldn't be a major problem for me,  I was worried about the sheer quantity of the words required for this project. 50,000 words! Eeek! It seems like such a lot, and it is, especially when you consider that the most I'd ever written before now was a thesis, and I had a whole year to write, research and perfect that. The words don't seem to be a problem, though. I'm not going to lie and say that I'm not just a little bit impressed with my word count, because I am. I'm pretty shocked too. I haven't even spent all that much time on my project. That said, I haven't read back over what I've written either, and I know if I did, then I'd probably laugh. A lot!

My second concern revolved around writing dialogue. I was and still am slightly intimidated by writing dialogue. I'm used to writing a certain way, and it's a way that has never involved dialogue between characters, so that is all new to me.  If anyone has tips to share on writing dialogue,  I'd love to hear them!

A little bit about my WIP :

I started this without a plan.  I knew I wanted to write YA and I knew I wanted to include some kind of paranormal, magical or fantastical element in the story. I also knew that I didn't want to write anything involving vampires, werewolves, angels etc. I love all of that stuff, but I wanted to do something different.  I was maybe 5,000 words into the story and getting along quite nicely with my MC, (I'm going to refer to her as L here) when I started wondering what strange element I would add to the story. Not gonna lie, I researched a little(I hear you are not supposed to do this! lol!), and I think I stumbled on a pretty fun idea. At least, its nothing that I've read about in YA before, although I'm sure its out there somewhere, in some form.  The working title of my project is CHAOS which lets you know that all sorts of bad stuff is going to happen! Poor L.

Some discoveries and a confession:

Remember when I said I was going to read my teenage diaries while participating in NaNoWrimo? Well, I read a few entries of mine and *confession* while I have complained quite a few times in my reviews about Insta-Love in YA novels, I discovered that as a teen I was quite prone to the odd bout of Insta-Love myself. *cringe!!* Also, L keeps on getting herself into situations where her possible love interest might kiss her, and I keep having to pull her out of that situation and tell her that she'll have to save it for later. This girl needs to learn how to play hard to get.  She's suffering from a bad case of Insta-Lust, and I don't want that to happen. Not yet anyway.  It's not going to be an easy road for L and mystery boy.

The name situation:

L's mystery boy doesn't yet have a name. I resisted Jay. I so wanted to call him Jay! And then I so wanted to call him Alex! And then I realised I couldn't do that because my favourite book boys are Jay and Alex, and well, I was never going to call him Patch after another of my favourite book boys. Uh, no. There might be a dog in the story - maybe I could call him Patch instead. Ha! So, I started referring to this hot guy by his surname, which is believable as a whole lot of guys I know are called by their surnames. Thing is the surname seems to have stuck, which is a good thing in a way because I love the name, and it works as both a first name and surname. Then yesterday I decided to google the name to check its origins and to take a look at the meaning of the name (just out of curiosity - his name doesn't have to have any special meaning) and I learned that the meaning of the name is something hideously ugly! Actually, it kind of made me laugh a lot, but now I don't know if I'll use the name, even though I've become quite attached to it.

If  I was planning this thing properly I would probably spend hours and hours researching names, but for now I have L and a boy with a dirty (it's seriously nothing that you're thinking right now!!) name.

p.s L does have an  name. I'm just not sure if that's her actual, final name as I just went with the first name I thought of when I started writing this.

p.p.s No, it's not Leanna.:D

That's all for my update. I'll try to update again soon!

I hope everyone else who's participating in NaNo is doing well and having fun with it, especially all my awesome writing buddies on there!