I actually outlined this year. I used to mentally lock up at the mere mention of an outline, but the fact that I finished a full rewrite of Kyrie in large part due to an outline has made me rethink my process a little bit.
Mind you, I haven't done a full outline. I only plotted about three-quarters of the way, and I'm okay with that. I don't want to know where exactly this is going to end up, but since I have so little writing time nowadays, I'm finding I need to have a clear idea of what's coming next every day so I'm not just wasting hours filibustering. Don't get me wrong, I liked the filibustering -- that's part of the fun -- but between the full-time job, hunting for a job that will pay me a living wage/not demonize me for being injured and in severe pain, trying to keep ahead of my husband's multiple health issues, and trying to not ruin our marriage by being so burnt out by work, I simply do not have time to filibuster now. (That's also why I don't post here as much. I want to, but I'm so burnt out by work that half the time I come home and literally stare at the wall for hours, trying to even begin to recover.)
Day 1 started out surprisingly well. I managed to rack up 2,252 words, the overwhelming majority of them on Lila, my Neo (the second iteration) while waiting for supper to cook.
Day 2 started rough (overslept and also spent almost 45 minutes on hold with Amazon customer service because they screwed up my order), but managed to make up the word count in the evening.
Day 3 was the first time (of many) I struggled to make the word count. There's definitely a logistical flaw in my story, and I'm still partly in revision mode from the Kyrie rewrite so it was hard to me to let it go and continue the story without solving the problem.
However, I did rediscover Margaret Becker's music and have been playing the heck out of it. Every song is a straight up banger and I feel like I can conquer the universe after listening to this stuff. How have I not fangirled over her work before? Now I understand why my mother had her music on repeat all the time when I was a kid.
Week 2 was basically a write-off (not in a good way). More marital problems (it seems these always crop up whenever I'm trying to do something creative), and work problems conspired to make this week one of the worst NaNoWriMo weeks I have EVER experienced. I say this as a fourteen-year veteran of the sport with nearly 20 NaNoWriMo-born rough drafts in my folders. There were several days that I didn't even make 1,000 words, and I don't think I have EVER done that during NaNoWriMo before.
After one of the worst writing weeks in my entire writing life, I decided that since the work problems are likely to continue (they are mostly management related and not likely to improve anytime soon) and marital problems happen at the most inopportune times, I would build up a massive lead this weekend.
It's going well so far. Day 11 (yesterday), I racked up 4,187 words, bringing the novel's total to 22,006. So far today I've gotten to 25,128 words and might poke at it a bit more tonight. I do have tomorrow off as well, but we've got some errands to run so the numbers may not be as big. But I want to get as close to 30k as possible before I go back to work on Tuesday.
I'm not feeling the story yet, but I've had a couple of small bursts of inspiration and the outline has definitely helped a lot. I've had to remind myself that exposition is okay right now (there was a metric ton of exposition in Kyrie, and I've spent the better part of two years trying to convert those long swaths of many-weeks-compressed-into-two-paragraphs into actual scenes with motives and tensions and resolutions and foreshadowing -- but all of that takes days, if not weeks, at a time).
Lila has been indispensable this year. I'm pretty sure this is the most I've worked with Lila since before I went to college. Even at home, I've been using her to write, and of course she comes to work for writing on my break (I usually manage about 300 words or so on break, which is 300 words less that I have to write after work when I'm so angry and frustrated at my job that I'm literally crying).
TL;DR: Still not fully 'into' my story, work sucks and is profoundly affecting my writing (more than college ever did), but I'm spending this weekend building a word count cushion, Lila is awesome, and I love Margaret Becker.
