Today I had a very frustrating writing session. I struggled along with flat descriptions, slow pacing, and characters with erratic emotions that didn't match the scene. It was painful. It was torture. I finished two hours of writing and thought I'd barely gotten 800 words. Nope, I'd written 2,358, more than my daily allotment.
But it's not good. I know that's okay in the NaNo rules. I know that it's less about writing something readable and more about just writing out the story, but the scene is haunting me, so I have a feeling that tomorrow will begin with rewrites. The scene doesn't need to take that long (and if I'm going to keep the book down to a decent page count, it can't take that long).
I know where I went wrong now, after a day of percolation. I lost sight of where the tension was in the scene. I can fix that.
I spent the day feeling bad about how long it's taking me to get the feel for this story and to get the pacing right for these characters. And then I sat down at my desk to blog and looked at my calendar: Nine days. I've been working on this novel a whopping nine days. It's time to cut myself some slack. Madison, the novel I love and am almost ready to sell, has taken me two years to perfect to the point where I take pride in it as I read it. I think that expecting that same level of polish after nine days was a bit much. It's time for me to lighten up.
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