Ah, Week Two. Week Two is a rather infamous week in NaNoWriMo. It’s the week a majority of participants drop out. If you’re going to drop out at all, you’re going to drop out in Week Two. Week Two is where you stop writing. Week Two is where the optimism ends and the despair begins. If you keep writing, it tends to get better. If you don’t, it’s the end of the line. I’m pretty sure that every year I didn’t finish, the last word written was written in Week Two.

This year, Week Two went like this. On Tuesday, the panic finally started to set in and made up for lost time. On Wednesday, I stopped liking my story and where it was going. On Thursday, I stopped writing. For a few days I had been writing 2000-3000 words a day in an attempt to catch up, but every time I got close, it got to be the end of the day and another 1,667 words were due. I was in a perpetual state of being about 4000 words behind. Cue the annual despair! Which led to not writing a single word in the last three days. And now it’s day fourteen and I have 14,380 words, which is about 9,000 words behind schedule now.

And I kind of want to stop.

But if I keep writing, I’ll feel better, even if everything I write is dribble. Dribble is editable. A blank page isn’t. Such is the NaNoWriMo way.

The story’s stagnating a bit, and I’m probably going to recast some things to contradict what I’ve already written to keep things interesting. It’s going to be a huge organizational mess, but it’s already quite the organizational mess so that probably doesn’t matter. There needs to be more treachery in this. And some people could probably stand to die. Could probably use some new characters and a proper, not-so-vague antagonist with a real goal and motivation wouldn’t hurt, right?

A lot of these things could have been avoided if I had planned properly in October, but as it is, more and more things are being pushed to the very uncertain post-November editing period. I feel that I desperately need to chart a map of the area because as of right now, I still don’t know what kind of environment this story takes place in. I also don’t know the scale of things, like, for instance, how big these countries are and how many people would be in the armed forces of a country that size. I’m making up the names of minor characters on the fly and forgetting them immediately. But editing and straightening and making things make sense is for December! And in the meantime, the mess persists.

Writing in order — writing the sequence of events in the story chronologically –  has also been supremely difficult. Giving in to the challenge not to jump around in the timeline and not to write flashbacks (or include werewolves) would make things easier. I would probably have double my word count then. The thing with writing out of order is that I can always jump to another scene where something more interesting is happening. Writing interesting thing always goes faster than writing boring things, but in the end I would have a bunch of randomly interesting scenes with nothing to connect them. Transitional scenes are kind of boring. I need to work on making them less so. So I should really, really keeping writing in order.

Once I get around to writing again.

Being behind is definitely a motivation killer. Being ahead spurs you to want to stay ahead. Being behind is like… I’m already behind, so whatever?

I guess we’ll see what happens in Week Three. Man. Is the month really half-over already?