Dateline 11-9-2017

Today makes day number nine of this year's NaNoWriMo challenge and I am still chugging along at the proper pace to finish this project on time. I'm finding that I really like the daily word count goal set by the self-paced competition because it sets a scale of sorts that allows me to see at a quick glance just how successful my day has been.

Other than the lost day where I crashed out before my writing session I have yet to not meet the bare minimum count which makes me feel successful. During the days that it took me to make up for said missing day I felt the first burst of pride when hitting the daily goal then the second burst would hit when I would end my day with the overall goal even closer to being within reach.

The other day when I got fully caught up I felt more accomplished than I have in a while, keeping in mind I have just finished a second major rewrite of a different novel. Then again, I was actually pretty excited about completing that task, especially me my last minute October 31rst deadline that I set after deciding to do NaNoWriMo. 

So maybe I wasn't more excited to get caught up on a minor 1667 word deficit than I was when I completed a major draft. That said, I am finding that I have been feeling a stronger sense of accomplishment meeting the three to four-page a day goal than I felt when I was knocking out fifteen to twenty-page chunks during the rewrite.

That's not to say that I wasn't excited or proud of these earlier feats but minus any pronounced sets of goals, I simply felt like I was doing what needed to be done. In fact, I'm willing to bet that if I didn't commit to participating in this year's challenge, I'd probably still be whittling away on my rewrite knocking out four or five pages a day at an extremely casual pace.

Even if I never do anything with this new NaNoWriMo novel, I think I learned an important lesson this year that I will use in future projects moving on. My plan following this year's challenge is to shift my attention to adapting all on my feature-length screenplays into an epic series of novels.

Where I normally would just fly by the seat of my pants and just work whenever I have a free moment, I will now take the first draft that I want to adapt and divide up the page count to where I'll have daily goals and a predetermined deadline. I would go with word count if I was talking about a novel to novel rewrite, but since I'm talking adaptions where I'll have to expand my work focusing on the page count of the original piece will make it easier to get things done.

Alright, there you have my insight of the day now it's time to get to work on my next task in order to get another dose of deadline pride. As always, I'll be back tomorrow when I check in with another update. Until then, I hope you have a good day while meeting deadlines of your own.

Talk to you soon.

Sincerely,

The Wicker Breaker

P.S. If you are reading this and playing along with this year's NaNoWriMo feel free to add fubunker as your writing buddy and I will buddy you back.