Ashton Daigle

Captains log stardate…

Oh wait a minute, wrong channel. Obviously the coffee hasn’t fully kicked in yet. We’re talking Na No Wri Mo here, not Star Trek; which is probably a good thing in hindsight.

Anyway, work on my October “test” novel is progressing. I don’t know if it’s progressing at the speed I’d like it to, but it is moving ahead. Sunday and Monday were both low production days. This happened partially because Sunday is just Sunday and family things and football were going on. Similar story on Monday night, New Orleans Saints were on Monday night football. You have to love the home team - even though the damned Vikings beat them by a field goal.

But I digress.

The second issue that I found going on Sunday and Monday pertained more to the Na No test run and the writing process in general. I wrapped up my second chapter late Saturday night. I wrote the bulk of and finished Chapter 3 mostly yesterday, on Tuesday. I noticed the lapse in between was mostly me - planning and plotting out the next scene in my head before I sat down to write it.

When I actually sat down to write it, Tues. morning, it came out fairly quickly. If I had to guess, I’d say the 1,440-word chapter was finished in under two hours. Granted it’s also the shortest chapter written too, so that may be something to consider.

The bottom line is that, if I intend to finish a 50,000 word novel in 30 days, I’m going to need to take a lot less time planning and plotting out what I’m going to write about in the next chapter.

I know exactly where these characters are going - essentially into a big jam/conflict. Now it’s my job as a writer to get them there as quickly as possible but (and here’s the catch) without compromising plot and character development.

My biggest challenge, for both books, is going to be letting go of the anal part of me that wants every character, every word to be carefully chosen. There isn’t time for that.

There’s going to be a fine line between churning out crap and quality, readable material here. I’m obviously going to have to learn to walk that tight rope a little better.

In other Na No news, I want to put a shout out to Eric Schweer, proprietor of two blog sites; chihuatude.blogspot.com and smalltownmountainboy.blogspot.com.

My intentions to write two novels in two months came to Eric’s attention through a mutual Plurk buddy, Butterflylitgirl, who has her own blog site at poseysessions.blogspot.com.

Eric was kind enough to feature me on the latter of the two sites listed above and will be checking in on me and my progress from time to time.

Total word count - Ch 1- 1,895

Total word count - Ch 2- 2,267

Total word count - Ch 3 - 1,440