Yesterday, I gave in to my dark side and I rewrote the chapter that had been making me stuck. Bad, bad, bad NaNoWriMo participant. My word count statistics now say that I’ll reach my word count goal sometime in January. Considering that they probably don’t account for Christmas breaks and that 50K words does not make a full-size book, that had the potential to depress me for a while.

Then I got over it. When I think back, the first few chapters of a book always do take me forever, or at least they do if I ever wind up satisfied with them. I wrote most of Ghosts in September and October of 2011, but I’d been working on the first few chapters ever since a line came to me in January of that year. I wrote most of Time in the summer of 2013, but I’d been writing and rewriting the first five chapters for a solid year at that point.

Remembering this has encouraged me both to trust my own process and to keep moving forward. I have an idea of what the scene I’ll be working on today is going to be about and I’m looking forward to writing it, so onward I go. I hope today that I can at least break the 1K mark and with any luck, maybe push up to the 1.5. That’s nowhere near enough to catch up, of course, but it would still be making more progress than I’ve had in several days, so I would count it as a success.

I just need to remind myself not to edit. I can handle that, right? But I seem to be an editing addict. Maybe I need a 12-step program for editors. First step, let the words flow.