The first week of NaNoWriMo is complete. Here’s how it went down for me.

I started late and slow. In past years I’ve begun writing right at midnight after whatever Halloween festivites I’ve taken part in. This year I was exhausted by about mid-afternoon on Halloween and in bed by 9:30pm, asleep by 10:30pm. I started writing on November 1st after I got home from work and errands, feeling like I was already playing catch up. I only hit 1250 that night before I was starting to fall asleep at my computer.

The rest of the week hasn’t been much better (day-by-day stats are below) but I’m still feeling pretty good about my writing in general. It’s been a very long time since I’ve written more than 500 words on a single project or even felt like maybe this could be a novel that would actually work. That’s pretty exciting, even if my daily word counts aren’t anything spectacular.

I’m still hoping to boost those word counts though, and get a hefty chunk of this novel down as something more than an incoherent jumble of exciting ideas. I’ve been re-reading Rachel Aaron’s 2K to 10K for help with that. (I seriously cannot recommend this book enough, in case you didn’t notice.) Not just the parts where she explains how she boosted her own word counts (though that’s certainly helpful), but mostly the parts where she talks about how she plots her books and makes sure she knows what’s going on—which I think is the real stumbling block I’m up against right now with my NaNoWriMo novel.

While I’ve never been an outliner, the one novel I’ve finished is one that, when I started, I knew my main character and both the beginning and the end. I didn’t have to know the middle bits; my character determined that as she made decisions that worked towards the the logical end. For the novel I’m working on for NaNoWriMo, I’ve been trying to plot as I write, trying to figure out my world and my characters as I encounter them, and I’m writing towards an unknown ending. I think it’s that particular unknown that’s tripping me up the most—it’s why my word counts stalled out at the end of this week—and it’s definitely something I’m in the process of figuring out in the hopes of boosting those word counts again. This revelation is something important to remember as I go forward in both NaNoWriMo and other writing.

All right, stats.

• Total Word Count To Date: 3,231

Words Per Day
• Nov 1: 1,250 (Total: 1,250)
• Nov 2: 1,368 (Total: 2,618)
• Nov 3: 0 (Total: 2,618)
• Nov 4: 107 (Total: 2,725)
• Nov 5: 336 (Total: 3,061)
• Nov 6: 170 (Total: 3,231)
• Nov 7: 0 (Total: 3,231)