Day 7:  The unfortunate truth from today’s calendar…

Nobody said it had to be good, now write…

• Target for the day, get to 11667 words
• Current word count 5824 words

While that particular truth may seem disheartening my advice is don’t worry about it, no one will have a finished novel on November 30th. Even the ‘winners’ of NaNoWriMo will have no more than 50000 words down. A lucky few may have gone beyond that and written sixty or seventy thousand. At the very most what any ‘winner’ will have is a complete first draft, and first drafts are as a rule a bit on the crap side. Heres a helpful quote on the subject to put it in perspective, from the delightful Shannon Hale…

There are exceptions to this rule. I have a friend who writes a single draft, then sends it to her editor, but she writes maybe 300 words a day, 500 on a good one, and tries to perfect every word along the way, as a full-time author she spends a long time on these few words a day. I am sure she wouldn’t write a first draft in thirty days. A year perhaps…

So no, nobody said it had to be good, just that it has to be written. Remember that.

My first published novel (as I may have mentioned previously) started out as a NaNoWriMo. Believe me, no one, including me, ever wants to read that first draft. I sure as hell don’t want to after three redrafts and many months of work turned the bare bones, hacked out story, into the novel I wanted to publish. ‘Cider Lane’ became the novel it is after a lot of hard work. But don’t dismiss for one moment the NaNoWriMo version of the novel. That still forms a good 70% of the final text, and the novel that it became would never have happened had it not been for the NaNoWriMo novel it started out as. So don’t worry about it being good, and write…

But let’s put that to one side, because sometimes this blog writes itself for the day, and last night it did just that, due to bloody annoying technical difficulties. Between my lunch hour and a small amount of downtime at work waiting for a conference call to start I hacked out a good 500 words yesterday afternoon. (Hurray, put the flags out, words on the page…) Then before I left work I hit save to send the document back up to my One Drive and all was good. I had a fine start on the days writing and once I got home, ate and did a few jobs about the house I could carry on…

Typically an error happened when I threw the file up to the cloud and when I tried to open it at home I got the version from last night and 500 words were not there. The joys of writing on multiple devices and expecting the tech to do its job right…

So rather than just write I spent an hour trying to move a file from my work laptop to my desktop. Which as it would not just do it over the internet consisted of me scrounging around the house for a USB drive. Which despite being certain I have lots of them, I couldn’t find. Then I reset the laptop and tried to get One-Drive working properly again, changed file names, messed about with file types until I finally managed to get it to move the file properly in word via a VPN once I got it up and working through San Fransisco from my laptop to my pc which was sat next to it my front room in Teeside.

This was not the kind of procrastination I was looking for, I needed coffee at this point and realised to my utter horror I was out of milk… Some days just want to kick you in the &%&**^%(*%, so a trip to the shop was in order, for as everyone knows…

One needs one’s caffeine….

But anyway, finally I got to work on the story again and made some inroads into the word count deficit. I can’t help feeling I would have made more if I hadn’t had the issues with the cloud drive. The lesson here is, save often, save properly, and if your gonna use the cloud make sure the cloud behaves itself…  And don’t forget the milk…

Adios for now.

Mark

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