Well, the end of the official NaNo month, anyway. As we move into the final days, how are all of you NaNers doing? Still moaning with Thanksgiving excesses and too busy talking with relations to write, or picking up speed on the final sprint to 50,000 words and 3/4 of a draft? (Sorry to be a spoil sport, but unless you're writing middle grade fiction, 50K isn't a novel).
As I expected, I slowed down a lot through the holidays as I was busy with cooking and talking, but I managed to write each day through our visit with relatives. I reduced my target to 1000 words, which is a little less than an hour's work if I've got a good idea where I'm going (that's getting harder--more on that in a moment). Currently my word count stands at 43,000. That's a little ahead of the amount needed to reach 50K by the 30th, at least if I bump my output back up to 2000 words daily.
Two things are going to make it harder to pound out the pages the way I'd like to. For one, I've run out of the part of the novel I had "outlined" (okay, that I had laid out in the Flash Fiction pieces I've been reworking into a novel), so I have to keep stopping to plan where I'm going and at least a hint of how I'm getting there. Some of that is on paper, and some is in my head. The other issue is that I've done far too little to plan and publicize the release of The Problem With Peggy tomorrow. It's probably a bit late to do much, but I'll be working on that for the next few days, hoping to make a few people aware of the new book, at any rate.
Overall, I'm pretty happy with my progress. I think I can realistically expect to hit the 75 or 80K mark (what I consider a decent first draft for a genre paperback; I tend to need to do a fair bit of fleshing-out after I finish the first draft) before the Christmas holiday activities get too distracting.
So for those of you doing NaNo, here's a big shout-out for your efforts in the final days. You can do it! And for those of you who aren't, you still get a big cheering on for whatever project you have in hand. I know that the serious writers are always writing (or editing), so a bit of encouragement never goes amiss. Accept that holiday distractions will slow you down, but carve out whatever time you can to keep writing. It's good way to stay sane (or to make your insanity legitimate: "I'm not crazy! It's genius burning!").
Naturally, with the book coming out tomorrow, you don't expect me to fail to say:
Grab your chance to join the Ninja Librarian in celebrating the release of The Problem With Peggy on Nov. 28! Preorder from Amazon or Smashwords for the ebook. Preorder the paperback directly from this site before midnight Monday (PST)--that's tomorrow!--and we'll pick up the shipping costs in the US!
Keep up the good work. You're doing well, and I never know how you guys can do NaNo with a major holiday in the month. I'm featuring Peggy tomorrow :D
ReplyDeleteThank you! Hey, if I didn't crawl off for an hour each day, at least, of quiet time by myself, I'd go nuts. So it sort of works to keep writing.
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