Nanowrimo Week 2!

Week two is one of the hardest weeks for me.  The crazed excitement from week one has worn off. All of the ideas I've had bouncing around in my head have already made it to paper.  I've hit a lull in the action.  Quest preparations are underway, but gearing up is boring.  My writing is in a slump.  I gave myself a bit of a break today and sketched this lovely map:

So, now that it is painfully obvious that cartography is not one of my strengths, let's discuss how helpful this hideous map is.

My characters need to find something.  I need the route they take to that something to make sense.  I also need for it to remain constant.  Should they pass through the same area twice, the area needs to remain unchanged from the last time they came through.  A map becomes a necessity when your characters travel.

This map was a bit more fun than most because it's a fantasy world, so I could put whatever obstacles in their way that I wanted.  Need a harrowing rescue scene? Add some quicksand and poisonous snakes.  Do your characters need a push to help them snuggle up? How about some spooky scenery to force them into each other's arms? 

I've still got a general outline of where I want things to go, I just have to trudge through some mundane detail until I can get to the fun stuff.  It's the hardest thing for me to write.  I don't care about the setting as much as I care about the action.  I don't care about dialog tags as much as I care about what the characters actually say.  I always have to go back and add those details in later.  My characters just talk to each other without the meaningful glances, furrowed brows, and cracking voices that will tag the dialog later.

The best thing about Nanowrimo is the it's meant to be a rough draft.  No one's expecting your 50k to be polished and ready to publish on December 1st. 

So, here's to another week of writing! My my quest preparations be completed quickly so that the story becomes fun to write again.