At the end of April I was pleased to announce that I had written more than 20,000 words of the YA science fiction novel that month, meeting my Camp NaNoWriMo goal for April.
I’ve been writing since then, and today went to add up the words to see how much further I had progressed in the more than two weeks since then. I knew I hadn’t nearly kept up my April pace, but I knew I was making progress. I was expecting to see that I was at about 25,000 words. And then I checked my word count.
It now stands at 19,074.
After all those days of writing, I LOST about a thousand words! I try to tell myself that’s not a bad thing. I’ve been editing a bit as I’ve gone along, and have cut some unnecessary prose. That’s what writers do. But I guess I cut more than I thought. I really believed I’d ended up with a net gain. This is discouraging.
So, do I forge ahead now and write more chapters? Do I go back over the chapters I have to see how to fix my conviction that they’re in the wrong order and contain some redundant or out-of-place information? Or do I take this opportunity to do something I’ve been putting off: checking my source material for world-building facts that I’ve been leaving placeholders for until I do the research?
Some days, I love writing. Some days, it sucks. Guess which one today is?
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