Tag: nanowrimo.2007

I managed to squeeze in about 800 words during lunch today. The target for the day is 3,000 words so I did just over a quarter of my target. I’ll have some more time between 4 and 5 PM and may be able to squeeze in another 500-1,000 words. The scene I am currently working on is a pivotal scene in Part I of the story. While not quite the climax, it is the convergence of a series of events that lead up to the climactic ending of the first part of the novel.

Total NaNoWriMo word count stands at 22,060 words.

By now I’m fairly certain that I won’t hit the 50,000 word mark by midnight on Friday. However, I have a plan to continue the novel regardless. My new goal is to be at around 30,000 words by the end of this month, 60,000 words by the end of December, and 90,000 words by the end of January. Since I’m estimating that this novel will be 90,000 words when it is complete, that gets me a finished first draft on January 31, 2008.

My new goal is to submit the novel to a publisher on my birthday, March 27, 2008. That gives me two months to work on a second draft, once the first draft is completed. So even though I won’t “win” NaNoWriMo this year, the experience will have been well worthwhile. Never before in my life have I written 30,000 words in 30 days. Not even close.

This evening, I did a hair over 2,400 words, bringing my 27 day total to 21,276 words. If I can do 2,400 words tomorrow, Thursday and Friday, I’ll hit 30,000 words before the month is out.

Incidentally, as of tonight, this is officially the longest story I have ever written.

Busy morning at work, doing the stuff I was supposed to be doing yesterday, before getting side-tracked by the metrics issue. But I found a good stopping point at lunch today, and proceeded to sit down and do more work on Graveyard Shift. I did about 1,000 words on my lunch hour, completing a key scene, one that ties some important plot elements together. I’m hoping I get a chance to do some more before the end of the day today, but I don’t know if I will.

The NaNoWriMo word count stands at 16,398.

Well, the writing went slowly, but well. In the last couple of hours, I did about 2,400 words spread over about 3 scenes, including what I think is some really good character development. In addition, things are in place for a climactic scene that takes place in chapter 8; everything in the previous three chapters has been leading up to this, so it should be fun to write once I get to it.

Today’s efforts puts me at a grand total of 15,430 words. Still rather far behind the curve, but the point is that I’m back to writing every day, and I’ll keep it up until I’ve finished.

I just completed 1,200 words of work on Graveyard Shift which is a little more than a third of what I want to get done today, but which does push me over the 13,000 word mark overall. I’m pleased with the scene I just finished writing; touching without being too melodramatic, I think. Still, it’s all first draft so who knows what will stay, what will change and what will get cut.

Hopefully, I’ll get some more done a bit later but I’m taking a break for now.

I didn’t think I was going to get any writing done today, but I sat down around 7 PM and managed to do about 1,400 words. That’s still nearly 300 words short of my daily quota, plus I was still a day behind so I still need to do 3,000 words tomorrow to get caught up. But I’m feeling good about how it’s going. Total word count is 11,570 after 8 days–and average of something over 1,400 words/day.

I did another 1,400 words of Graveyard Shift when I got home from work this evening. That brings my total for the day to 3,900 words, which is very, very good for me. I was 5,000 words behind pace at the start of the day and I finished the day 1,500 words behind pace. I also passed the 10,000 word milestone. The novel now stands at 10,149 words. and I am more than 20% of the way to making the goal of 50,000 words in the month of November.

I can only hope to have as good a day tomorrow as I did today.

Productive, but tedious morning at work. I spent more than three hours doing some data conversion that was very time consuming, yet at the same time, made the morning just fly by.

I didn’t take my lunch until 12:30 and I spent the entire hour working on Graveyard Shift. I did another 1,480 words this afternoon, bringing the total for the day to about 2,500 words, or half of what I need to get back on pace.

Good stopping point now, so I’m going to grab some food and then get back to work.

By the end of the day today, I need to be at around 11,000 words if I am to be on pace for NaNoWriMo. At present, I’m at 7,300 words and I really don’t want to get any farther behind than that.

I had a good session this morning, beginning at 6:30. I wrote just about 1,100 words. The total word count only went up about 500 words or so because I deleted about 500 words I wrote yesterday and rewrote the scene from a different, more interesting perspective. I know I’m not supposed to be doing much rewriting at this point, but I think this was necessary for continuity and making the scene work.

Incidentally, I love Scrivener, the application I’ve been using to write the novel. It keeps things very simple so that I can focus on my writing, and not worry about formatting. It’s got a feature that allows you to set session goals and monitor your progress, which has been helpful. Yesterday, I went ahead an purchased a full license for $34.99 and now have a full registered copy. I think I’m finally done with Microsoft Word for everything except final manuscript formatting. That alone is worth the cost of the license. But the software really is great. Those interested can download a fully functioning version for a 30-day trial. The only catch: the software is Mac-only.