NaNo: Day 1

I cannot tell a lie:  I’m feeling rather scattered and stressed as NaNoWriMo kicks off today, and so I decided to stay up and get a head start.

I spent the day throwing together a first chapter for a contest that ended today.  I’d spent time on it weeks ago to plot it out, but then changed my mind on the world and genre.  This past week, I spent a little time each night reworking the plot to fit into the new world, but I only had a few hundred words of the chapter started. 

Determined to submit after spending so much time plotting and worldbuilding, I hadn’t taken careful note of the deadline, and nearly freaked out when I realized I couldn’t wait until midnight to submit, but 5 PM PST.  I rushed to complete my project before heading out for dinner and trick or treating for the monsters.  This is a new story, but connected to something I’ve shared and hinted at before here.  I hope you’ll end up seeing more of it next year, regardless of how the contest pans out.

I wrote over 2K for that project and a query, but couldn’t count those words for NaNoWriMo.  Since that project was handy–instead of Victor–I went ahead and worked on the next chapter tonight.  NaNoWriMo is all about the words and pushing forward no matter the cost, so you may see tallies across both Victor and the new one I’m calling Deathright.

Today’s Total words:  3,745

NaNoWriMo Total:  1,687

Deathright:  4,603

Victor:  31,430

To keep everything straight across multiple previously-started projects, I created a “NaNoWriMo” document to which I’ll paste each day’s new words regardless of project.

Each day, I’ll try to post a tiny snippet, maybe a single favorite line, etc. just to keep things interesting.  This is the opening line to the new story:

The most pressing difficulty with living on a remote planet dedicated to the study of alien species was, quite simply, the aliens.