NaNoWriMo Progress Report Day One

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NaNoWriMo is National Novel Writing Month. The idea is to write a 50,000 word novel during the month of November, that is, roughly 1667 words a day. Because I will not be able to write every day, I decided to try for 2000-2500 words a day. I planned to start this morning by writing a passage about a famine. If I finished that, I had another passage planned where the main character’s sister gives his favorite dog to his best friend. This is poignant; the main character has just been kicked out of his house at the advanced age of eleven. His sister is afraid their father will take out his anger on the dog. I needed to introduce the famine. I started a scene… in the winter with the main character and his sister clearing snow away from the front of the house. It dawned on me as I was writing it, this didn’t belong before the famine, but just before the main character got the cruel boot from home. It included a metaphor I could use in a couple of scenes, including as scene where he kills a dragon and the scene when he dies. I spent the morning arranging all this. I like it. Following the guidelines of NaNoWriMo, I didn’t edit but kept writing. I wrote total of 710 words. And none of them went writing the scene about the famine. But tomorrow is another day. Forty nine thousand, two hundred and ninety words to go.