I woke up very, very early this morning.  Not just early for me, but early for many normal people, too.  Like 6:30 a.m. early.  Granted, it’s not unusual for me to wake up early as a part of my usual sleep pattern. Asleep--awake--asleep--awake--asleep--awake… ahh, it’s wonderful to be an insomniac.  But no, this was a different kind of waking up, I was awake for two hours.  Two hours!  I might as well have gotten up for the day, except that I didn’t get to bed until after 2 a.m. and… well… I get grumpy when I try to function on so little sleep.  I’m not pretty when I’m grumpy.  Of course, I probably only got another solid hour of sleep after that, but it’s the effort that counts, right?  I’m competitive about trying to get my sleep in.

I digress.

So, anyway, I was awake for a long time this morning.  And after the usual thoughts: what I needed to do today; wondering what the cats were destroying that was causing such loud noises in some other part of the house (mysterious nosies as it turns out, since I couldn’t find anything that had been disturbed); trying to remember what I ate yesterday because I was really hungry for it to be so early in the morning; contemplating applying for Canadian citizenship, you know, the usual early morning thoughts-- I started thinking about my NaNoWriMo book.  And I started to get excited.

No, not that way. 

I have been waiting for the motivation to wear off.  I have been waiting for the story to fall apart.  I have been waiting for the inevitable moment when I hate what I’m writing.  One week into it, and it hasn’t happened.  And I didn’t even feel compelled to add “yet” to that sentence.  Go figure.

In fact, as I lay nestled among the quilts and flannel sheets and down pillows and cats (who had returned from their battles to nap), I started coming up with new scenes, new ideas for advancing the plot (did I mention, I have a plot?  I’m not just writing words!), new dialogue for characters.  It made me want to get up and start writing.  I didn’t, but I thought about it.  If you knew me, and how I am in the morning, you’d know what a big deal it was for me to just want to get up and write.  Wow.

This is the feeling I didn’t have last year when I signed up for NaNoWriMo.  I don’t know if it was because I didn’t really have a clear idea what I was writing or because of the hundred other things I had going on last November, but after the first three or four days, my momentum started slipping.  I tried to hang onto it, but by the middle of the month it was gone.  Once I took a couple of days off from writing, there was no getting back on track and I quit.

Of course, I’m only a week into this year’s novel and there is still time for it to fall apart.  I could very well finish this month the way I finished last November-- with several thousand words of drivel.  It could happen.  But for now, I am bouyed by a sense of accomplishment-- over 18,000 words and I’m pretty sure I’m good for another 10,000 just with the scenes I plotted out in my head this morning.  I would like to hit the mid-point by Wednesday, November 10.  I know I’m being overly ambitious in hoping to hit the 50,000 word mark by November 23 (Sheri’s arrival date), but right now I think I can do it.  I’m motivated, I have a story and I’m excited.

Okay, maybe a little bit that way.

Posted by Kristina in Writing at 10:53 AM Permalink