Bang on target

Because I am deep in NaNoWriMo, this is another post about it. Feel free to stop reading now - normal service will be resumed in December...
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Oh, you're still here - good!

Last night, for the first time, I hit the target. On day 18 the target was 30k. I sort of wanted to go a bit over, even an extra word or two would have be great - but the scene ended perfectly at 30k, so I saved the document and closed it down. It's waiting for me now, I can hear it calling.

As you know, I started November with a title "The Day Nothing Happened" and a first line "Yesterday something happened". Then it turned out, as I started writing, that quite a lot was happening, and I changed tense - half-way through - to past tense. So the first line no longer fits. Argh! I've never had to rewrite a first line before, it's usually the one fixed thing. Anyway, that's something to think about in December - I'm not going to bother changing the present tense at the moment, I need to push on and finish.

From the initial idea of having an explosion in a hotel, I've managed to get five separate story lines - the survivors of the incident all have their own stories to tell. One woman who was trapped has post-traumatic stress, another woman used the chaos to run away and pretend she was dead, another kidnapped a coma patient. Then I've also got a pregnant widow, and a man who's trolling Facebook - although that story line isn't fully fleshed out yet.

It's been fascinating seeing these stories coming to life, and my characters having their own thoughts about their situations. None of them are related at the moment, and I'm unsure whether to force them together, or to leave them separate and just passing each other randomly in the street. I know, as a novel, they should be connected by more than just the explosion because at the moment they read as intertwined short stories.

But again, that's a question I'll be able to answer in December. The first thing I plan to do is print out the MS and cut it up, putting all parts of the same story lines together to make sure they are complete and don't have huge gaps. Then I'll be able to see if they can slot together. There is a precedent of leaving them separate - eg. Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk, and probably lots of others I can't think of at the moment. But whatever happens, I'm definitely hoping this book will turn into something and not be left in a drawer.

Is your NaNo project something long term, or just a collection of words?

PS. I am still reading blogs, but commenting on all of them is too time consuming at the moment. I hope you understand.