This week was a little crazy, and I missed my Wednesday update. So I’m catching up now, and let’s just pretend I adjusted it on purpose because the last week of November is always slightly too long for an update and a wrap up… or something.

This week I broke 20k! That’s pretty exciting. This was also the week where I accepted that I wasn’t going to make it to 50,000 words before the month ended. It was possible, but there were some struggles I was having (more on that in a minute) and I probably didn’t have time to do the work that would allow me to boost my word counts as much as I would have needed every day to make it.

Well, I thought to myself, that’s ok. This is still more than I’ve written in years, and I’m happy with that. My new goal will to be to write more this year than I’ve ever written during a NaNoWriMo before. That was about 24k, I thought, and since I had just hit 19k, I was sure that was pretty doable. But I went and checked the stats that NaNoWriMo so helpfully provides for its users. It was not 24K as I had previously thought; it was 14k. I had already blown that goal right out of the water without knowing it. So I readjusted again. I’m aiming for 30k as the more challenging number, but if I only get to 25k, that will be ok too.

My challenge for this week, and thus also the coming week, is this. As I began to move forward in my story, I realized I knew basically what was going to happen, but I didn’t necessarily know how those larger plot points were all connected. I knew what was going to happen, but not what was going to happen next. And yes, I can write those big things, those big exciting and fun events, but then what would happen when I ran out of those to write? I got desperate enough that I started making a map, something I swore I was never going to do again.

Maybe it was a crisis of confidence—after all, I’d written a novel before simply by asking myself, “What next?” and that had been enough to propel the story forward—but every novel is different. I’ve been struggling to get even to 1,000 words in a day. Maybe I don’t know enough yet about my world and my characters and my plot to get to the end of this novel.

Well, that’s ok for now, though it’s going to make for a really interesting editing/rewriting process. For now, I’ll write my big scenes, the exciting and fun ones that sprung fully formed into my head and what make me excited about this book, and I’ll get as many words out of them as I can.

This Week’s Word Counts
Day 15: 671 (13,834)
Day 16: 1,344 (15,178)
Day 17: 0 (15,178)
Day 18: 2,143 (17,321)
Day 19: 1,700 (19,021)
Day 20: 0 (19,021)
Day 21: 1,274 (20,295)