I have not gotten off to the greatest start with Camp NaNoWriMo, though I have been able to up my writing frequency from semi-daily to daily. I think the main trouble is that where I could spend an hour to an hour and a half during NaNoWriMo typing to get my 1,667 words a day, writing longhand for that amount of time just doesn’t get me that kind of wordage. I have to step it up and devote some evening, at-home time to my writing.

This is infinitely more agreeable because I can write on a nice surface like a desk or a table instead of on my bag on my lap on the train. Also, my apartment tends not to move or curve from left to right like the train does. Big pluses, those.

I started writing Project: Destiny in a spiral-bound notebook and soon rediscovered how annoying it is having those metal wires under my hand. I wanted to buy a nice journal to write in, but didn’t want to commit to copying down what I had already written into it. Then I decided that the prologue could be in the spiral notebook (it takes several years before the story so I won’t likely reference it often) and I could continue with chapter one in a nicer book.

I picked this up at a bookstore downtown. The text on it reads, “Brighten up… life does not always have to be black and white.” The text repeates in French and German. I don’t know that the words are necessarily relevant to the story, though I do like the mention of “black and white” since those are two of the colors of shadecraft. The pages are lined and the spine is bound with two bookmarking ribbons, though they’re joined at the bottom for now.

As of now, I have finished chapter one at an unimpressive 1,993 words. I am getting through this draft by telling myself that things can be cleaned up and expanded upon later. NaNo last year helped me to realize that a large part of my problem with writing is my insistence on getting every little detail right the first time around. That’s what the revision process is for, though. Until the thing is bound and printed and on bookstore shelves, I have the power to change and improve it.

I’m not going to sweat it, I’m going to write a messy first draft and try to turn it into something better once the whole story is out. In this way, I’ll finally finish this project that I’ve been working on (in one form or another) for almost fourteen years.