So now I’m thinking, if I can do this in November for NaNoWriMo, why can’t I do it the rest of the year as well?
My daily target is 2,000 words, which means I can also have 5 days off. My usual daily target is around 1,000 words per writing day. If I upped that to 2,000 words, and still had the whole weekend off, that would give me around 40,000 words per 4-week month.
NaNoWriMo advocates 30 days of writing, at 1,667 words per day., and I’m averaging more than 3,000 words per day – at the moment. This means I will probably hit the 50,000-word target early, and it also means I’ll have more than just 5 days off (if I downed tools and stopped writing as soon as I hit the target).
So why can’t I work on that basis the rest of the time? Laziness, probably.
Anyway, I had a bit of a brain murmur during the night, one of those lightbulb moments. Aside from upping the stakes to life-or-death for my modern-world pair of sleuths, I was also wondering why they’d be interested in the first place. Why would they be bothered about something that happened 25 years previously, when one of them would have been aged 10 and the other would have been aged 8?
I was setting the “new world” in 1999, because that’s 25 years after the Birmingham pub bombings, and 3 years after the original Marcie Craig story. But what if … they discovered the mystery a year earlier? What if … they discovered it right after the historic Good Friday Agreement of 1998?
The agreement had taken years and years of negotiating, and in the mid- to late-90s, it would have been in the news everywhere. And my two current-day protagonists would also be more aware of it all at that time.
And that, my friends, was my brain murmur. Smug much? Moi? 😏
I had a late start again today, but I still managed to finish the first half of Act II Part I. I also did three scenes of the second half of Act II Part I. At the moment, I’m trying to keep everything in chronological order. But I also had to make a note of my new idea, and then change the dates for the “current day” scenes already started.
Still happy with progress so far.
