Nanowrimo Day 6 End

I have a total of 11,716 words.
6557 of those are in the Janis novel, which are on the Nerwen name.
5159 are in Amulet I take 2, on the Kayara name.

Original goal was 3500 words per day. That means I'm supposed to be at 21,000 words right now. Which makes me about 10k words behind.

There's going to be some discrepancies in the daily wordcounts when I go back to make my Excel progress chart later. Jer's Novel Writer wordcounter =/= the TextWrangler wordcounter =/= the nanowrimo official counter.

Sometimes I wonder if I just enjoy doing the math more than writing.

I've said before that I'm not really a writer - not in the way that other writers are. I don't get all passionate in the same ways, and it isn't a crucial need to write lest my mental health degrades. I do need an outlet to express myself, but it doesn't have to be fiction writing.

From the Making Light blog comments of that slushpile thread I read last week, there was a comment about editors. Editors are answering a calling to edit, in the same ways that writers answer their calling to write. Editors aren't failed writers and don't necessarily have a desire to write.

I'm an editor, not a writer.

I wonder if there's such a thing as freelance editting.

At least I'm starting to feel some stabs of worry about my abysmal wordcounts. Sadly, now is the wrong time for them because I need to get up early in the morning and can't just stay up all night tonight. The next big block of time won't be until tomorrow night.

What's sad is that I had 12 hours of uninterrupted time today and all I got was a measly 2000 words.

What's even sadder is that unlike the previous two years, I haven't the foggiest idea where I'm going with either of the two novels. I thought I knew when I started, but the lack of outlines is starting to catch up to me now. I can sort of see ahead by about a scene or two, maybe, and even then it's kind of hazy how exactly to get there.

It's probably time to switch back to the Janis novel and figure out what exactly I'm going to do with that "meet grandma" scene. Either do an abrupt fast-forward finish and move on to something more exciting (though what that might be, I have no idea), or come up with something exciting to do with the present scene. I just have a few scattershot points I want to include somewhere in the next 10k words, but that's not very helpful when I don't know what the bulk of the words will be. What I probably need to do is make a list of more detailed plot points to cover, then figure out which ones should go into what scenes, before I can continue.

As for Amulet I, that's sort of stuck now too. The Duchene brothers need to come up with something really big to offer to the native folk. Otherwise the native folk have no actual reason to continue to talk to them. Like with the Janis novel, there's some scattershot points I want to include in the next 10k words somewhere, but without any idea what the main points are, that's not very helpful.

Well, tomorrow I'm going to be running around town on errands, and then I have to actually stop in to work because my boss wants to talk to me so much that he actually stopped by my desk to schedule it last Friday. So I'll hopefully have some time to think about these things, maybe do some freewrite/outline time, before writing time recommences.