Counting Down

It is now less than a week until NaNoWriMo begins and my preparation is worryingly scant.

I have an outline plot and I have quite substantially prepared the first chapter and know where that is going for the most part. Thereafter I am plot light. This is a mixed blessing. My experience of preparing the first chapter is that it has gone off in directions that I didn't expect while still staying within the broad boundaries of my original story idea.

I have a very strong suspicion that by the time I get to the second draft this may well be a very different novel to the one I originally thought up. That will probably be a good thing. The main difference is that as I started writing the characters became clearer to me and various thematic links suggested themselves.

I am still concerned about whether or not my work commitments will allow me to hit the desired 50,000 words given my tendency to go back and revise what I did the day before. I need to free myself up just to get stuff down. Of course my instinct is to try and make the first effort as good as I can but I also know that when, hopefully, at the end of November I come back to start revising I will inevitably make substantial changes anyway based on my knowledge, by then, of the ending.