Well I'm having a great time, Capri! I'd love to have your company on my NaNoVirgin escapade. You can keep this newbie on the ball.

So far so good. Not counting Mudcat posts and emails, I've written >1,500 words since I started on it this aft. Not the words per hour output I was hoping for but I'm having trouble switching off my internal editor!

Capri, when you say writing leisurely, what does that mean to you exactly? To me, leisurely is a method of writing that usually involves correcting and revising along the way. But I'm trying to approach NaNoWriMo differently, in the spirit they suggest, which is all about quantity, not at all quality. For me that's "Writing Down the Bones," right-brained, stream-of-consciousness writing. No internal editor, no fix-as-I-go writing, just write whatever's in my head yet hopefully express it through the characters I've chosen so that my month of rambling might fit into a unifying theme when I'm done.

To me, NaNoWriMo is definitely not about pressure writing. Pressure writing is
..having a deadline
..AND needing a certain article length
..AND having to be coherent.
It's so much not pressured when the product doesn't have to be coherent! So I'm aiming to leave logic and flow and rhythm and perfecting for the revisions. My only pressure is not to over-think while creating, to have the self-discipline to churn out everything and leve the sorting for next month.

The last time I wrote that way I scared myself somewhat silly with some of the shit that came out but it was really cool raw material to work with! Trust me though, if this time is anything like then, I'll think twice about posting it publicly *without* editing. When I'm more confident my word count will be sufficient (like when I have 35,000 words done by Nov 10th--wink) I'll tidy up a sample to post. Or use some of today's output which sadly is edited on the fly; as I said, my internal editor is very much alive and in gear today.

I've till gotta write several nearly 1,000 words to meet today's goal of 2,500 words! And there's also dinner and an extra quartet rehearsal to fit in before bed time as well. I'm aiming for more than the minimum average of 1,667 words per day: My a cappella quartet is in a contest mid-month so I'll lose 3 writing days to that, yikes! (I can't write/type on the 8 hour bus trip each way because I get nauseous, and the day of the contest itself is spoken for, of course.) Then on the 22nd I have a handbell performance for which I have to do some significant preparation, and on the 26th I have two handbell performances each in a different out of town location, which writes off that whole day!

So I'd better get back to it now. I'm having a great time, wish you were here!