To blurt, or not to blurt

The honeymoon phase of writing is in full swing. I came in just under my word count, but what I did manage to get out was knock-my-socks-off great writing! That is, of course, in my humble opinion, which is surely colored by the novelty of novel writing. So, there's the good news.

The slightly less-good news is that I'm constantly fighting the urge to edit. I wrote in one sentence that a character was giggling. Then a few sentences later, she was completely quiet. So which is it? Is she giggling or is she being quiet, because she can't be both. She was quiet, I finally decided, and went to re-write that sentence. While I was trying to figure out how to reword it, it occurred to me that this was time spent editing when I should have been writing. Little bits that don't make sense in the moment can't slow me down from getting the words onto the paper, so instead I made good use of the strikethrough option, crossed out the words "She giggled" to remind me when I start revising that this section needs to go, and I carried on. After waking up to that issue, I caught myself doing it nearly every other sentence. The result was that I wrote something really great, but the downside was that it took so much time to get those words out that it put me in a time crunch elsewhere.

I'm going to have to find some kind of balance between editing as I write (which is evidently my natural setting) and the carefree word-vomit of NaNoWriMo. There has to be some middle ground between sculpting every sentence right out of the gate, and blurting out every rambling thought that springs to mind.