So when we last left our hero (who is me, in this instance) I was at just under 15,000 words and discouraged as heck. The problem at hand was that I had veered very far from my outline and felt like I was wasting my time doing work I was only going to have to cut out later.

So I went out with my husband and we talked out the plot for a very long while and figured out where I went wrong so I could fix it. This involves back tracking a smidge and rewriting a scene so that it happens differently but I am not going to actually “rewrite.” Instead I’m just going to continue writing everything that is new and just go back and fix the old stuff when NaNoWriMo is over. I am, however, going to try to go over 50k enough that the “rewritten” scene isn’t part of the count because that is how I work.

Then I took 3 days off from writing entirely while I was stuck and did “day job” work. This was a gamble as it squandered the fact that I was so far ahead on my word count but it let me do some of my other work so that I could take a little time today to work on NaNo.

And I took that time today that I bought myself over the weekend and I managed to not only get everything back on track, but I just stopped at just shy of 18,000 words.

Yay!

And I should still be able to write a little more tonight after I make dinner and do the rest of my day job work so maybe we’ll hit 20K by the end of the night. We’ll see.

You know what is neat, though? When I felt like I was wasting my time the other night, it ended up being productive afterall. Not only did it show me what *not” to do with my story, it also yeilded a random scene that I threw in as part of my half asleep desperate attempt to get my word count up that informed the change I needed to make to get back on track. So the lesson learned is that no matter how bad your writing is, sometimes it’s still helpful/useful to the project as a whole.

This is a very helpful thing to remember as we come into NaNo Week 2, which is the week when it gets harder and you want to quit. Keep going, on matter what!

My little potato graphic is down at the moment so you can’t see his cuteness but I put the official NaNo widget in my sidebar if you want to watch my progress in non-potato style.

So I sign off with 17,886 words so far with hope for the future!

And how is your NaNoWriMo novel going?

You may also enjoy these related posts. . .

• NaNoWriMo Update: 75% and back to the same book…sort of
• 5 Tips for using Twitter during National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo)
• My National Novel Writing Month newbie/first timer pep talk #nanowrimo