NaNoWriMo: Week 2 Update and having some doubts
Hello, my NaNo word warriors! How's your word count coming?
I'm not quitting NaNoWriMo, don't worry. But all through week 1, I was just ready to hit my head against my keyboard over and over again (replay the gif from last week).
And it took me waaaay too long to figure out what exactly the problem was. I mean, I was hitting my word count goal every day, but I wasn't super sure what was making me grind my gears so hard. But ha, dumdum me, I didn't realize I was lacking all conflict!
Due to Javi being, what, six? and taking a liking to the cat folk characters really easily so that I could have them forge a bond, there was no conflict between the characters. Then they were on the skyboat for chapters on end, so could be no conflict between the cat folk and the other humans. There's a small amount of conflict between the catfolk themselves, but it's still brewing and hasn't 100% come to light just yet. Now all the conflict I had in my outline is starting to come in to play, and tension should start rising, but I'm still not sure. I'll probably write the entire story the way I outlined it, just to see if it's salvageable that way, but what I'm realizing now is that the story really needed another, or perhaps a different, child character.
What I'm saying is, since Javi is so young and trusts so easily, the worst thing he could do is get ticked off about some small thing or get hurt to the point where they make him cry. What the story might need (later, in editing, probably not now) is either for Javi to be a couple years older and therefore already have his prejudices against the cat folk, or for there to be another older kid to accompany Javi and try to warn him about the cat folk. I know that out of context my lack of conflict doesn't sound like that big of a deal, but in order for the ending I have planned to be as powerful as I want, there has to be some kind of problem between Javi and his mentor. I just haven't figured out how to make that work yet.
Word Count Update:
As of the day I'm posting this, November 12, I have 21,575 words. So proud! There was a time where I had to write an extra day's worth over the weekend because there was a day I wouldn't be able to write, and then it turned out I had a ton of writing time the following morning, but all that is behind us now.
Gifs
And now this week's feelings in gifs!
Tryna up my word count like:
When I'm getting into a smooth writing place and sOmEoNe InTeRrUpTs mE
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