It's Day Three of National Novel Writing Month. For the uninitiated, every year, hundreds of writers all over the world use the month of November -- 30 days -- to hash out the first draft of a 50,000 word novel. Give or take a few, it means writing about 1,600 words a day. NaNoWriMo is simultaneously harder than it looks and easier than some people think it is.

Here's a run down of my last three days.

Day One
I didn't plan on participating in NaNoWriMo this year. I told myself I had other, more important, things to do, like work on this website and my poetry and all the umpteen-billion other projects I've got going on. But about 7:30 p.m. on the 1st, I got the urge to write, and sat down and slammed out some 500 words in half an hour. By the end of the night, I had 1200 words, and I figured, what the hell, we'll do NaNo this year.

Day Two
I started Day Two behind schedule, but the story was just picking up and I had most of the day to work on it. My protagonist is really starting to show his colors, and some interesting supporting characters were cropping up. Not only did I catch up, but I even ended up exceeding Day 2's goal of 3333 words -- my final count for the night was 3,789.

Day Three
I woke up this morning ready to go. I had a few moments where I wasn't sure where the story needed to go, but I tooled around with it enough that something came to me and I pushed on through. Even while juggling a few conversations on IM and Twitter, I hit Day 3's goal of 5,000 words around 3 p.m. It's only 7:30 right now, so I'll probably knock out a few hundred more words sometime this evening.

Observations
I'm a whore for statistics.
NaNo's site provides you with a bar graph showing all 30 days, with a blue bar on each day to show where you should be at and an orange bar to show your current word count. Just seeing my orange bar go up as I write is turning out to be a big motivator: I like to see how far over the blue goal bar I can get it, because I like to see my little orange wordcount bar lording over and gloating over the mere amounts the blue bar represents. Ahem. What I mean to say is that statistics, at least for me, help me motivate myself to write.

Writing buddies rawk.
NaNo lets you add buddies, and you can watch their progress throughout the month. This helps me in a number of ways: if I start falling behind, I can see that some other people that I know to be talented writers are falling behind too, and I don't get as discouraged. If I'm feeling competitive, I can see who has the highest word count and do my best to unseat them.

Right now, the target of that jovial ire is Sharon T. Rose, author of the weblit Space & Time. This chick slammed out 6,000+ words on Day 2, making her some sort of word-spewing MACHINE, and while I've caught up some, she's still a good 2,000 3,000 words ahead of me. Sharon, it's on. I'm throwing down the gauntlet.

Twittering As Your Write
Sort of a strange experiment I'm playing with is tweeting pieces of my NaNo project as I write it. This started on my main account, and while that wasn't a great idea (I started losing followers for making so many tweets in a row), I adapted it by making a second twitter account called ggnote, which I'm using as a sort of digital notebook. Limiting yourself to 140 characters makes you think about your writing in a different light, and I'm finding it a useful tool for jumpstarting my writing when it starts to slow. You're welcome to follow that account if you want to catch glimpses of my NaNo project from time to time, but be aware it may lead to a flood of tweets in your feed.