I did a lot less work on Obscure Origin yesterday than I had hoped to because I got on a real roll with finishing a final paper and I didn’t want to stop. And in the time I did have to write my story, I kind of went down a rabbit hole with name generators to come up with better alien names than the ones I had picked (they sounded very human, and that didn’t make sense). On the bright side, I didn’t waste time because I found better names for my extraterrestrial characters and finally named their alien race—it was bugging me to see [alien race] all over my novel and outline. And I wrote over 1000 words, half a chapter, and passed the 5,000-word mark, so it’s definitely still a writing win.
I also downloaded a free version of Campfire based on Natalia Leigh’s recommendation (there’s a free trial for the full month of April), and it pushed me to further define the alien species (in comparison to humans). And if you’re participating in Camp NaNoWriMo, there is a Campfire discount code for you tp use by the end of August.
This only means that I’ll be spending a lot more time this weekend writing to try to catch up to my writing goal.
When you’re writing, do you leave placeholders to go back to or do you need to know everything beforehand?