While we’re not quite halfway through the month, we are at the end of the second week of NaNoWriMo. By this time, we’ve identified three groups.

1. People who have way too much time on their hands. Devoted individuals who are already over 30k, and asking on Twitter what they should do with the rest of the month. Let’s not dwell on these bastards.
2. People who have put in the extra effort every day, but carefully meted it out so that they didn’t burn out. Now they are watching the little black line on the NaNo Stats page, making sure that they can keep up with the pace.

It’s November. Fall has finally taken hold and started making threats about the upcoming Winter. The election is over, Thanksgiving is yet to come. . . It’s also time for the NaNoWriMo whining to start.

Every year that I’ve been involved with the National Novel Writing Month, I’ve seen a proliferation of blog posts regarding it. Those posts fall into two categories:

1) Tips on how to put a huge, devoted effort into one month for a story you’ll probably never sell.
2) Snide remarks about how stupid it is to waste a month of your life on a story you can’t sell, and how you waste hours of editors time with those same stories. I’d like to speak to the writers, editors, and publishers who have advanced these ideas.

Today was a bad day, writing-wise. We’re on day two of NaNoWriMo, and I was spitting fire on day one. Over 2,000 words on the first day is a good way to start. I knew I’d burn out eventually, but I was feeling good.

Today I hit a slump. It’s not that I didn’t want to write. It’s just that I knew what was happening in the story, and this was going to be a boring bit. I mean, all stories are peaks and valleys. You have new, exciting things, full of plot twists and gunfights and dramatic heart-wrenching breakups. But then you have the lulls in between, where you set people up for the next big peak.