Ok. So. As it turns out? I’m not good at planning my stories. Obviously this is something I need to work on. My word count for Week 1 might seem dishearteningly low, but a major part of that is a Day 2 project switch. I had a project I was interested in working on—and some of an important scene sketched out on scrap paper—but then I had a dream.

I’ve written before about how dreams inspire my writing and my current project came entirely from a dream I had on April 2. But switching projects meant not only scrapping what few words I’d already written for the abandoned project, but also building a world from the ground up, figuring out the new characters, figuring out the magic system—oh, and of course figuring out what the broader plot of the story beyond the instigating incident (i.e. the dream). Which meant a few days doing some mental sorting.

In the end, writing on the new project didn’t seriously begin until yesterday. I wrote 682 words, and I think I actually have forward momentum at this point. There are still some important things to figure out for this story—does it have an antagonist? does it need an antagonist?—but I actually have enough of foundation to just write my way into those answers.

I’m still at the point where I have to remind myself every few minutes that this is just a first draft, that I’m supposed to just throw everything I can at the project right now—and not even check to see what stuck until after April is over. Right now I need to put all the words in one place. I can shape the book later. As Rainbow Rowell said in her NaNoWriMo peptalk, “But then I thought about how wonderful it would be to have a pile of 50,000 words… […] First drafts always make me feel anxious and a little desperate—like, ‘Oh God, I just need to get all of this out and on paper, so that I have something to work with.’ I like having something to work with.”

So that’s where I am now.

• Current Word Count: 682