Before heading down for my writing residency at Weymouth, I spent the last week reading through the 23,000-plus words I’d already written in my WIP to re-familiarize myself with the storyline and to reenter the atmosphere of the draft. I was pleased with the progress of the story, but it ended right in the middle of a scene. I must have been following Hemingway’s golden guide, to stop writing when you know what’s going to happen next. But what Hemingway didn’t do was let his stories languish in a drawer (or in this case, my hard drive) for a year before he decided to go back to them. After several false starts on what I had originally planned to happen around the dining table at Winslough Hall, I found myself back in the zone and finished the scene. Then I began a new scene and paused about 200 words in. Tomorrow I’ll pick up my characters doing their midnight reading of Wuthering Heights.
So, in the first two days of Nanowrimo, I’ve captured 900 words in my goal to add 50,000 more words to this novel. Here’s what my progress looks like today: