NaNoReMo and Lake Emily

I only have a short post tonight, since all of my writing energy is being directed in a very specific direction these days. However, I want to make sure the blog is still getting enough oxygen to stay conscious, and posting a progress update is a good way of keeping myself accountable, so....

A few weeks back I mentioned here that I wouldn't be participating in National Novel Writing Month this year for the first time since 2008. Now that November is officially halfway over, I can honestly say I have no regrets about that decision. Fifty thousand words written in even semi-coherent order in a month is no small feat, and I have nothing but admiration for anyone who dares to accept that challenge. For me though, at least this year, it was more important to work on my 'Lake Emily' revisions, so I proclaimed November to be my very own National Novel Revising Month.

So far it's been a month of scrambling at school to reduce the work I need to bring home to an absolute minimum (which wouldn't be such a bad plan all year, really), letting the DVR slowly fill, waking up early, staying up late, and listening to a lot of nine-minute Iron Maiden songs to get myself in the proper mindset to tell this story. I'm very happy with the work I've done so far. I'm ecstatic about the outlining I've done and the new directions everything is heading, but I have to own up to it being a slower process.

Not a surprise, really -- when your #1 goal is to build word count, you don't always have to work so thoughtfully. Revising, though? Totally different. Everything is about thoughtful and careful and deliberate, to the point where I spent the better part of two hours this morning fighting with a section that was only about 700 words long. It was totally worth it though, because they were 700 tremendously important words, and getting them locked down in the proper order has been an obstacle I've been fighting with for a long time now. With any luck I'll reread that same passage tomorrow night and it won't completely suck, then I can lock it down as part of the revision.

Maybe I'll be done on the 30th; I'm sure going to try. Having a nice long Thanksgiving weekend away from school will help with that. It will be nice to finish this version, and super nice since I can already see how much better it's going to be than it was before. I'd sure like to live in a December where I wasn't plowing through life in overdrive, so that's motivating me. Plus I've got two other big external motivators driving me forward: One is a huge, and still unlit, Vanilla Bourbon Yankee Candle sitting next to my computer screen like a babysitter, reminding me what I should be doing instead of taking ridiculous Facebook quizzes when I sit down in the office to work. The other is the awful feeling that I might be the one nerd left in the gaming world who isn't yet hip-deep in playing Fallout 4.

Since I'm not even allowing myself to buy the game until I'm finished with revising, that's really starting to itch....