Two days ago I wrote something so crappy it almost made me kill a project.

As I’ve written before, because I don’t have enough to do and am a total moron, I decided to try National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) on top of this blog and my job. The results have been mixed.

First, it’s clear that in it’s current state, the “novel” may not make it to 50,000 words which means it doesn’t count as a novel. This is partly because the nature of NaNoWriMo seems to make you either over-write or under-write in order to meet the quota.

Second, in order to meet the word quota, I’ve been tolerating stuff that I know will eventually have to be cut. I’ve gone back and rewritten a few scenes to flesh them out but that’s caused other passages to be out of place and, in the case of a couple scenes, irrelevant. However, if I cut them out, I have to do that much more work to replace them.

Third, I am, on occasion, capable of producing scenes that are nothing but crap. I wrote three pages of one scene before stopping myself and going “really, DL, really?” I had to stop writing and think a lot more about the project. The next day, though, I rewrote the scene before the crap and wrote a scene after the crap that, mercifully, made the crap scene unnecessary. In fact, the scene has the unique pleasure of being both unfinished and useless. However, I’ve left it in at this point to keep the word count buffed up.

Thus far, for me, the most useful parts of NaNoWriMo have been 1) the discipline of making a regular time to write; 2) using free time to write instead of waste time; and 3) as a source of at least two blog posts, with at least one more to come.

I’ve missed the quota three times, including today and am now a couple hundred words behind “par”. Luckily the weekend in approaching and I can catch up.

However, the novel’s still on track to be too short, which means I need to sit down and re-rethink it. Which, unfortunately, doesn’t count toward the word quota.