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For the past week I have been doing NaNoWriMo. In that time I have written a little over 12000 words. The challenge is to reach 50000 by the end of the month. As long as I don’t suddenly lose my fingers or suffer some sort of mental paralysis, it looks like I am on track to hit that target. After day one, I wasn’t very hopeful.
On that first day, every spare moment I had I would try to write. I would try and no words would come out. I would write ten or so words and then flounder around trying to follow that up. I’ve written stories before. It’s not like I don’t know how to type the words out.
I even had a plan. It was a pretty loose plan, but I had one. I knew that I wanted a cold open. You know when you watch a TV show and this batch of characters kick off the episode and not one of them is in the usual cast. You’re watching along and this big dramatic event happens but you’re not sure why you should care, because, like I said, none of these characters are the main cast of the show. Well what if the same thing happened, but you don’t know who the main cast is so you follow along with these characters and something exciting happens and ‘woosh’ you are off to some other story that is as completely divorced from what just happened as it could possibly be. And the show goes for a while and you think, “oh. These are the main characters. So what was all that about?”
That. That is what I wanted to do with my opening chapter. So I had the plan. I even knew what would happen to the characters from the cold open. I know why it will be important later. Didn’t matter. I just could not get the words to come out.
I just barely made my word count that first day. The second day was the same. The third, a little better. By day five I was able to get into a flow and type most of the 1667 required words in one go. Today I did nearly 2000 words in about two and a half hours. There really is something to this whole, getting into a rhythm thing. 
I have no idea how the next weeks will go. Hopefully I can keep the pace up and not feel the stress of not hitting my word count every day. Lots of time left for the whole endeavor to go good or bad. 
Either way, I probably have some limited number of keycaps my fingers can tap in a day before wearing down to boney nubs, so I’m going to keep these posts shorter for the next few weeks. 

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