Today is day 5 of NaNoWriMo, and I’m busily listing all of the things I know about my characters and my setting.

Because I don’t have the faintest idea where the story goes from here.

This is where fast-drafting becomes really odd for me. It’s a little more like talking to myself than, you know, actually producing a novel. Or, maybe more precisely, my characters are sitting around talking to each other, and nothing is really happening, except, possibly, I’m working out the various relationships in the book.

The what’s going on.

The starting point.

And five days in and thousands of words on the page just seems like a really strange place to be looking for a starting point.

I’m trying to remember if this is just one of the phases of my picking up a new novel, or if there’s something wrong with this scenario.

I think the answer is that if I keep going, things will be fine.

But right now, there are a lot of things to distract me. Including, by the way, my own revision. Right now, it would be incredibly easy to walk away and never come back. It’s not that the topic is bad, it’s that the momentum just isn’t there, yet.

And damn, right, I’m going to count the list-writing words, and the characters talking to each-other words, and the inner monologues while staring at an engine words.

They may not turn out to be in the finished novel, but they’re definitely a part of the process.