Week two, more stalling

I read somewhere among all the helpful material posted on the NaNoWriMo site that week two is often the hardest for writers. In week one, the excitement and novelty of the challenge keeps your motivation high. You are also doing a fair amount of world-building to set up the story, and some writers can spend many hours and chapters introducing all the players.

In week two, some of the new-challenge glow has worn off, you are out of set up material, and it starts to feel more like work than fun. There are very few players in my novel, so I had less of the built in bit of introductory material to write. As I mentioned in the previous post, I started struggling early on, but I wrote enough each day to maintain the word average necessary to hit 50,000 in 30 days. For the first 10 days that is. Then I left town.

I went to visit a friend in Arizona for five days. I brought along my computer thinking that I might get up early to get in an hour or two of writing before everyone else was up. But I was fooling myself. We stayed up into the wee hours each evening, and I just didn't have it in me to take away hours from our visit to write. Outside of writing a few hundreds words while waiting for my flight, nothing was done for five days.

I thought that at least some ideas would be percolating in the background while I stepped away from the novel, but it didn't seem like I returned with much of anything new. Except an 8,000 word hole that I would have to dig myself out of. Time to return to my cramming skills developed in school.