The Countdown: Four

Here's what happened today:

• Lew and I went out to breakfast with our friends.
• Then we went to see Eli.  (Oh, yeah... we saw Matt and Emily, too!)
• We stopped at the grocery store.  (Even though we stuffed ourselves on Thanksgiving, I guess that we will still need to eat in the future.)
• The mail had piled up for a few days.  I finally went through it.  Paid some bills.  (Yuck!)
• I read the paper and did the puzzles.
• I did my devotion.
• While doing the previous three things, I also completed three loads of laundry.
• Lew and I ate dinner and watched the movie "Shutter Island."  (We're still scratching our heads.)
• Then Lew and I did our devotion.
• Now I am writing my blog post.

So, what is missing from the above?  If you're a regular reader of Mainely Tracy, then you know what I didn't do yet today.

That's right!  I have not written at least 3,540 words of my novel.

This is not to say that I have not thought about my novel today.  I have.  A lot.  In fact, I've thought so much about it, that I've decided to take some of the plot in a whole different direction.  (All part of the creative process, I guess.)  So when I sit down to work on it... probably tomorrow, at this point... I will have some interesting new twists to get down on paper.  Or on the computer screen, in this case.

I do have a dilemma regarding the NaNoWriMo challenge:  The new direction of the story contradicts some (most) of what I've already written.  In fact, some of the writing that I'm going to do over the next few days will be somewhat repetitive in nature.

My gut is that I should still count all of the words that I've written so far.  (Remember, the goal is 50,000 words.)  After all, I don't know what will stay and what will go when the editing process begins.  Plus, all of these words have been part of the process.

And from what I can tell, my experience is "normal" for NaNoWriMo!