12610 / 50000 words. 25% done!

I’m trailing a bit behind after getting sucker-punched by life.

One of the things I’m doing is going back and fleshing out scenes (or adding them) that I ended up outlining in my beat sheet that weren’t present previously. I’m finding that sometimes I need to explore a scene more thoroughly to get at character motivations, development, etc., afore I explore the rest of the plot.

I discovered today that StoryWonk is doing a day-by-day NaNoWriMo podcast (short and sweet) with inspiration and daily word count updates from the podcasters themselves. I quite like it, as I think you can’t get enough NaNoWriMo encouragement as you head towards the messy middle.

One of my favorite authors, Tobias Buckell, once said that the middle is messy because that’s where all the different plot possibilities take off. He’s so right. By the way, I recommend his book of “stories that didn’t work”, Nascence, for fledgling writers.