Today I broke 10k words in the NovNov challenge. Yay! So I’m averaging around 2k a day.
Apparently 55k people are participating in the challenge this year.
My prose is not as bad as I’d imagined it would be. I thought with this pushing to meet a daily word count goal–something I’ve never even considering doing before–that it would be absolutely atrocious. I’m pleased to discover this isn’t the case; rather than atrocious, it’s just not very good. 
But that’s what revision is for.
I’ve turned off spell check, so no squiggly red lines to distract me. When I realize I need to confirm a fact or maybe revise something I wrote in another scene, my process is to add a couple of sentences about it to a list, then keep on moving. Yes. sometimes I can’t help myself and I go back and fix stuff. But I’m trying really hard not to interrupt the flow by doing those things.
I’m writing to a fairly detailed outline, with character back stories, settings, etc., all prepared back in 2022 when I first had the idea for this story. (Even a few relationship & timeline & storyboard diagrams in Scapple!) Thank God I did all that pre-writing work when the idea was fresh, as I’d never have remembered a lot of the details.
Even with all of that planning and pre-work, getting the actual words out into Scrivener injects new levels I hadn’t thought of while planning–additional relationships between characters, between story elements, insight into themes, ways to foreshadow, etc.–mostly, I’m warming up to the three POV characters, or perhaps they’re warming up to me–but I’m slowly but surely learning to hear their voices better. The days their voices are clear are the days the daily goal goes by very quickly.
I continue to be impressed by the ProWritingAid community relations team. They did a ton of work lining up authors to run the workshops. (Over 50+ classes) (The Fast Drafting class by Jessica Brody–she wrote Save the Cat Writes a Novel–was a standout for me.) The NovNov website is thoughtfully designed and useable. No advertising on the NovNov pages. No pushing of product.
And they keep giving me badges! Love the badges.
Best,
Jim