November is National Novel Writing Month, called in the biz NaNoWriMo, or simply NaNo. The objective is to write the complete first draft of a 50,000 word novel (or 50,000 words of a longer novel) in the 30 days of November.
NaNoWriMo is nuts—and I would totally do it if I had the time!
1,667 words a day. Every day. For 30 days. It’s not really that hard if that’s your ONLY job. In fact, if it’s your ONLY job, you probably should be writing more than that every day when in the first draft phase.
But since I have a 2-year-old, writing is not my only job. I set my goal a little bit lower—to finish revising a first draft of 35,000ish words into a strong second draft. I’ve been doing quite well, I am happy to say. I’m about 20 pages/8 scenes from the end. I’m very pleased with it so far.
I am also pleased with my writing discipline this month. I haven’t been able to create any more time in my schedule, but I have clamped down hard on spending what time I do have writing. I have severely limited my social networking/Internet time, ignored my email, and pretended that Spider Solitaire does not exist. All the things I often allow to intrude “just for a moment” I tried to shut out. I am very happy with the productivity I have managed to find this month.
And I seem to have been infected with the NaNo bug, because the past few days I decided to actually keep track of my word count for the day:
Sunday: 1,600
Monday: 2,250
Tuesday: 1,140
Wednesday: 1,173
Wow. That’s a lot. An average of 1,541 per day.
Hmm. That’s not that far from 1,667 per day…
If you’re doing NaNo for real, how are you holding up?