A Quick Update On My (Lack Of) NaNoWriMo Progress

If you’ve been following along, you know that in the first several days of NaNoWriMo, I managed 13,000 words and was very pleased with my progress. Then things seemed to grind to a halt. I could claim several reasons for this:

1. I sat down to work on my story one night and instead ended up writing the entire first draft of a new story.
2. I had to travel to San Francisco and was overly optimistic about how much writing I’d fit in to an already busy schedule.

But the truth is these have been side-effects that are only indirectly related to my lack of progress. It seems that around November 5, despite my planning ahead, I wrote myself into something of a dead-end. The story seemed to drag and I found it harder and harder to write myself out of where I was. At that point, I was a couple of days ahead of schedule, and I felt that I had some time to think the problem through. But I didn’t make good use of that time. Then I got behind and still, I had no solution. As of today, I’m 7,000 words behind par.

I won’t be writing tonight. Tonight, I’ll be regrouping. This is the point at which it might seem most prudent to give up, especially since I am not actually writing a novel, but two drafts of a novella. I’ve given my problem a lot of thought and tonight, I’ll be reworking my ideas to get myself out of the dead-end that I’ve crawled into. Tomorrow night, I’ll start writing again, with an eye toward completing my first draft over the weekend. That will give my 11 days to write the second draft, but seconds drafts are my favorite part of writing and they tend to go faster because I have a much more clear picture of where the story is going. I fully expect to write 25,000 words of second draft in those 11 days.

Look for my daily progress report updates to resume tomorrow evening. In the meantime, I am queuing the Rocky music…