The Words: 2577 words total for the day. I almost always start at midnight on Nov. 1 (in my 11 years of doing NaNo, I think I’ve only not done this twice), but I was in a car at midnight. Fortunately, I’d thought ahead to the possibility of not being home and had my Neo with me. Though I thought I’d be inside somewhere. It still worked….not well, because it was dark, and while I thought that would be fine, because of the no-editing rule, sometimes I couldn’t even remember what the last word I’d written was. Or when I inevitably did go back and erase something out of habit, I wouldn’t know if I’d gotten it all. That will be the most error-filled 700 words of the entire novel at the end of this. But I digress.

I wrote another 700 words when I got home, during a word sprint started on the Twitter feed of @NaNoWordSprints, and went to bed with the smallest midnight-sprint word count I’ve had in 8 years. But I was content with my number. I wrote another thousand words this afternoon to get to the number above.

I often set my daily goal higher than the normal minimum, because it’s important to me that I finish the draft of the novel before the motivation of the month disappears. Unfortunately, I never know how long the draft will actually be. I’m guessing around 75k this year, so my daily goal is 2500 words. And because I also don’t want to finish the draft too early in the month, I’m going to stop at 2500 as often as I can (sometimes I just get the urge to keep going, ya know?). It’s a delicate balance, trying to come to the end of the draft right at the end of the month, considering I don’t estimate my total draft lengths very well. But I’ll re-evaluate halfway through the month or so and raise or lower the word count if/as necessary.

My daily updates aren’t usually this lengthy; I just had a lot to explain today.

The Story: Even though I tried to think ahead about how to start this novel for the last few days, when the time came to begin, nothing really felt right. I stumbled through the opening scene and then dove into the beginning of one of the 4 storylines that will comprise this novel. And then between writing sessions, I thought about a way the opening scene might be better, so I wrote a note to myself for future editing. I don’t want to start re-writing scenes already, so I’ll worry about it later.

Total word count: 2577

For almost as long as I’ve been blogging about how NaNo is going all through the month of November, I’ve been sharing each day’s NaNoToon. Sadly, NaNoToons ended last year. Rather than give up that tradition, I’m going to start going back through them, starting with the first year there was a storyline through the month. So for today, if you want to join me, check out the NaNoToon from November 1, 2010!
And in honor of November 1st, because it is absolutely not NaNoWriMo without the NaNoMusical, here is episode 1!