NaNoWriMo progress report

Well blogging on this subject has been even scarcer than actual NaNo words hasn't it?

Needless to say, progress has slowed somewhat this week. And last week. However, in an unexpected development last night (during a late night Write or Die session) an entirely new character shuffled onto the screen. I expected to just include him in the scene I was writing and move on, he was, after all, merely background material for the protagonist.

But then I realised he had not merely shuffled into the story - he had been chased there, pursued by a herd of rabid plot bunnies. I managed to beat off most of the bunnies but two stuck; I faced the stark realisation that actually I was telling the wrong story - something I had suspected for a while, but only now, 20,000 words in, realised whose story it was I should be telling. In the course of an hour, I had gone from having 19,000 words, most of which made some sort of sense together, to having a shade over 20,000 words, 18,000 or so of which were now completely redundant. And from having absolutely no sense of plot, to having two actually quite good and completely different directions in which I could take the story.

So, while I figure that out, at the moment my NaNo has a ridiculously long and convoluted Prologue, which will almost certainly never see the light of day, at least not in its current form.

Will I be blogging again this month? Well, I guess we'll see how the plot bunnies go on. Today, I think, will be another yellow day, but from tomorrow I'm going into overdrive in an attempt to get this thing written.

See you on the other side...