Okay, I knew I wasn’t going to be able to do it but give me an elephant stamp for trying! Here’s what happened:
Your Average Per Day 651
Target Word Count 50,000
Target Average Words Per Day 1,667
Total Words Written 19,547
Words Remaining 30,453
What this translates to is that I was going great guns for 11 days until I hit the wall. I’d gathered so much momentum that I completely spun out of control! It was like hurtling through the Burnley Tunnel at night with no headlights during a power strike.
In hindsight (that wisest of all sights), I should have stopped and taken a big breath. If I’d devoted about four hours to working out what my characters were doing, I could have ploughed off into the night again. Instead, I baulked. And then, because it was November and a rotten month for writing (see here for previous moaning about that) I stopped altogether. BUT WAIT that’s not all. After I’d recovered, and because I cheated in the first place, I found that I had about 30,000 words of a novel to work with. I sat down for that four hours, worked out where I was going, and bingo. I now have 42,000 words and counting.
It’s holiday time now. NaNoWriJa. Unless something happens, and it could (because that grassfire came damned close yesterday) I’m going to get a first draft done before I get back to paid work.
