Day 4: 6 November 2022
For this year’s NaNoWriMo, I’ll be writing for 22 days in November. This gives me a daily target of 2,273 words, which will be about 2 chapters per day.
Day 4 of NaNo should have been on Friday 4 November. However, we had quite a few errands to run on Friday, so I swapped it with a day at the weekend. This is one reason I give myself weekends off during NaNo – just in case I need to swap out a day or two. Another reason is to give my brain a rest.
The plan was to do NaNo on Saturday 5 November, but Saturday ended up being a day of household chores as well as a wedding do the poet’s band were playing at. So Saturday became Sunday…
The original plan was also to write 2 chapters per session, but the chapters are currently coming out at twice the length, which doesn’t get the book finished any quicker, but it does mean meatier chapters.
As I started to write the chapters on creating characters, I found that I needed to repeat the same information over and over again. I could have cheated, and just copied and pasted it all across. But not only would that not be in the spirit of NaNo, but it also wouldn’t do me any favours in the long run.
So I initially created an extra section in between Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 that I can link back to for the remaining chapters that will refer back to it, thinking that I can always go back when it’s all done and tidy it up, put it somewhere more logical. I thought about making it an appendix, for example, although that would push it to the back of the book and I really need it to be between Chapter 1 and Chapter 2.
And then I decided that the best place for it was before Chapter 1. So I renamed it Chapter 1, and renamed all of the following chapters to suit.
This faffing meant I didn’t write as many words as I could have done. But I did write more than 1,400 new words taking me to 10,211 words in all. At this point I needed to be at 10,000 words, so I’m ahead and I’ll work quicker next time now that this extra chapter is in.
Day 1 = 3,706 words.
Day 2 = 2,508 words.
Day 3 = 2,585 words.
Day 4 = 1,412 words.
I’ll be posting (week)daily updates, with Diary of a Tiger moving to a weekly Saturday post for the duration of this year’s NaNo.
