Finicky Friday

It's the first Friday of NaNoWriMo, and I had set myself a really ambitious goal of 20,000 words by the end of the day, which I met instead at 11 this morning. Yay me! But, today brought the first trouble in writing paradise, something inevitably happens to me, by usually not until much later in the project. I wrote approximately 3500 words today in a chapter without getting to the first point in the outline for the chapter. That doesn't mean that I shouldn't have been writing about what I was writing about, just that I finished my writing for the day and didn't even move a single point in my outline.

speaking of outlines, I didn't end up with the detailed, first draft quality outline I was going to try and do based on the book I read and reviewed, "First Draft in 30 Days" by Karen S. Wiesner. I'm still glad I read the book, but her workflow is different from mine. I initially spent a week trying to follow her plan and cram my style into it, but I just ended up getting stress headaches. I don't write to bet headaches, I write to avoid them. Or something like that. :) The one issue I have with Ms. Wiesner's plan is that she allots very little time to research, and as a writer attempting a science fiction novel that is based in real science, well, let's just say I had a whole hell of a lot of research to do before I wrote the first word of an outline because I had to know ifsome of my proposals were even remotely feasible. And since starting the actual writing, I have had to add in two additional research sessions. I think that perhaps if I were to write fiction of the sort that Ms. Wiesner wrote or mysteries as she also writes, I could have made her system work.

Maybe I'll put in some more writing tonight - if not to finish the chapter, then to at least amend my outline. :)