Blogging is easier than writing tonight, so today's a twofer.
Because NaNoWriMo is all about the word count (even though it's really not, it still is), we end up writing a lot of crap. Editing is discouraged during the mad dash to 50K -- "That's for December" -- so 28 days from now, I will have bits and pieces of a good novel, along with, more than likely, a bunch of junk.
This same thing happened to me last year, too. That's why 200 PC was 50,110 words in length on 1 December 2007, and today it's 51,417. It's not just laziness (though that's been a problem, too, and we'll discuss it eventually in this space). It's the fact that I've spent considerably more hours editing what I wrote last year during NaNoWriMo than I actually spent writing it in the first place.
So they aren't the same 50,000 words. I've replaced a lot of them.
I've still got a great deal of writing to do on 200 PC to get it ready to start shopping around, and I'll do that work. (Eventually. No really, I swear I will.) But the 2007 experience has prepared me for this fact: much of what I write this month will get tossed in the bit-bucket.
It's liberating at first, this thought. I can write whatever the muse hands me, whatever sounds good at the time, and fix it later. "Write 'em all, let the editor sort 'em out." Like that.
But these words are in some ways dear to me. They don't always come easily. It's a bit heartbreaking to think I'll be throwing many (probably most) of them out. I suppose, though, that it's not an experience unique to NaNoWriMo; this is how first drafts in general work.
So now back to writing trash, so to speak. Along with a few nuggets of gold, which I'll begin to mine in December.