Thoughts on NaNo-ing, week one

I hit 10k words last night, despite almost falling asleep while writing the last few hundred. So while I haven't written 2k words every single day, I've never ended a day with my cumulative total beneath the 2k-word average. So that's great, and I'm hoping to maintain that pace throughout the month. And I've managed to do that without cutting back on my running and biking or other stuff (a lot of raking this week, it seems).

The story itself...it's going well. In terms of narrative, it's pretty straightforward, which I think usually works better for something like NaNo. In terms of story and setting it's decidedly weird, which obviously was the intent all along with this story. In terms of character, I'm feeling good about the main character, feeling like I know pretty well how she'll respond to things, and the two supporting characters introduced so far are taking shape too--characters seem to often take awhile over the course of a book to reveal themselves fully to me, so it's still pretty early to have much more to say than that.

I still feel uncertain what to make of the whole NaNo culture. I respond well to having these publicly ambitious goals and an organized structure to support them. I've yet to make it to any in-person events, though, so my view of the culture itself is based on forum statements. There's someone in my local group who's already hit 50k...and I have to wonder how worthwhile those 50k words are. But then that's what people who haven't done NaNo say about NaNo in general, and I know for myself personally, I'm very confident in the 10k words I've written so far. They'll take revision, of course, but they're up to the same level as my first drafts usually are. I'm also not interested in the various competitions and challenges to see who can be the first to reach 50k or to see if people can whip out an addition 10k over this weekend, but that's just recognizing what works for me. Competitive as I am in some situations, I don't think that would be conducive to me writing a good first draft. But it's great if it works for others--I just fear sometimes that it encourages writing lots of stuff that's not worth its memory space...but then see my comment on the person who already reached 50k.

I'm still hoping to make it to an in-person event. Maybe this weekend? We'll see.