NaNo – Back At It Again

So I took a couple days off. I was ahead anyway. We had a bit to do around the house and stuff to do with the dog these past few days, plus work has been crazy busy, so haven't even had much time to sit back and think about what I want to do in the next chapter. I needed to create an entirely new setting for my MC (he gets hauled off to a mental institution, have I mentioned that?) and of course I'm creating all of this from scratch in my head. I don't know what a mental institution looks like outside what I've seen in movies and on TV. I put One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Next on the top of my Netflix queue, but I think I will wait to watch it until after November, so I don't taint my story with ideas that Ken Kesey cooked up forty-odd years ago. (Yes, of course I've already seen it, and read the book, which is great by the way, but writing about this made me want to revisit it again.)

I think if it wasn't for this deadline, looming, fifty thousand words due by the end of the month, I might have stopped here for a while, a decade perhaps, because it would have been just easier to do so than to stress over what my own version of an asylum would look like. But I sat down tonight (and after some encouragement from MC Etcher, thanks for that) and just started writing. I thought to myself, let's just describe this place. My MC wakes up in a strange place, what does he see? So I described the room, and as I did, I could see it in my mind. I added little details. There was a small desk under a window and someone had scratched some words into the top. I'll refer back to that at some point, probably will create an entire subplot to explain those words, or not, who knows. And the window cranks out vertically but only about two or three inches, so you know at some point my MC is going to need to drop something out the window barely two or three inches wide. Then he meets somebody, they have a conversation, he walks around, sees more of the place, meets more people, and the cycle has started again.

Point is, I forced myself to start writing when I really didn't want to – it's the perfectionist in me that doesn't want to start something unless I know I can do it well – and even though later, down the line, in the editing process, I might decide to throw out a good chunk of that exposition I drafted up detailing every nook and cranny of this guy's room, it helped me get this novel kick started again. Now I'm several thousand words ahead of where I was on Sunday, and I've got a score of new characters to interact with and a whole institution to explore. And boy will I.