This novel hurts to write....

I finally hit 26K. According to nano, by tomorrow night I should be at 30K; odds are I will not be. This story is strange, and has always been a beast to write: I know the next draft of it will pare down dialogue and boost description, but beyond that I am swimming for a shore that feels far out of reach. Boy & Fox has one thing going for it: I know the characters. They work, and they're alive in my head. The genre is however far outside my comfort zone of writing and each scene is pulling teeth and hoping I pull the right ones and end up with something that works by the end.

I don't expect to. Things enter, things fall away, the story shifts under me, but I know what works, and what will have to be fixed. That's something. There are no sections that will be deleted flat out and there are several scenes that almost worked as well as they did in my head.

This, however, may be the first time in my history of doing nano that I won't make the 50K. I could, by writing crap. But anyone can do that: often, my goal with nano was to get an idea out of my head. A break from serious novels. At some point, I began doing drafts of serious novels in nano. Boy & Fox is one of those. I may not make 50K on it. I know that if I do, I won't have finished the draft regardless.

And I think I'm okay with that. And a bit surprised to be okay with that.