First day of NaNo 2.0

I got in a very good morning writing session today, starting pretty much right after second dog walk. By late morning I’d topped 1200 words. I took a break then and paused to do some on-line chatting with my brother, some morning exercises, and take the dog out for third walk just before lunch.

I stopped at a point where I’m not quite sure what comes next. This is widely considered a bad move, because it makes it harder to get back to writing. Still, sometimes it happens, and it’s worth having a couple of tricks for getting going again.

Here’s one: skip ahead and write a “candy-bar scene.”

A candy-bar scene, if you don’t know, is a scene that you already know is going to be fun to write. A scene where a character does something wonderful, or something wonderful (or wonderfully awful) happens. A scene where a reversal happens that’s both completely unexpected and inevitable. A scene that makes you reinterpret the whole story up to that point.

Besides being fun to write, hopefully a candy-bar scene is also fun to read.

Arguably, your whole book should be nothing but candy bar scenes. In practice that’s hard to do, but it’s certainly something to keep in mind.

Anyway, I had a candy-bar scene in mind as something I could write when I got back to writing this evening. In fact though, I picked up exactly where I left off, adding a good bit to the scene that had petered out on me in the morning session. (I can probably credit thinking during a dog walk for this.) Then I did go on to write the first bit of the candy-bar scene I’d had in mind. But only little bit of it, leaving a nice ragged edge where I know what happens next, all ready to pick up tomorrow.

It’s a nice feeling.

Another nice feeling is that I hit the target word count. (That is, the 1667 words per day I need to average, if I’m going to hit 50,000 words by the end of November.) I’m not actually very fixed on hitting the word count, but I figured I give it a try, at least for a little while.

For the morning writing session I wore my writing vest—the moleskin vest Jackie made me years and years ago, that I took to Clarion with me, and have made a point of wearing when I wanted to crank out some serious words. It worked great.

I didn’t get a photo, but I’ll try to get one later.

This evening I switched to my wool Filson vest, which I’d worn for warmth when I took the dog out for fourth walk, and I got a sort-of picture of me wearing it, sitting with my dog.

It’s a little hard to see in the photo—the green vest looks almost the same color as my grey mock-T—but this is the same vest that Joe Pickett wears in the C.J. Box stories. It is cozy and durable.