My NaNoWriMo Round 4: Week 5

Final update for this year’s National Novel Writing Month challenge! With only days left, I’m down to the wire to crossing the 50K word count finish line. Can I do it?

I shouldn’t get too ahead of myself. Let’s focus on whether or not I stuck by my word count and goals this past week.

My Progress

This week’s goal: Keep my 1,667 daily word count pace and reach 45,009 words by Sunday night.

Once again, I did it! I kept pace and surpassed 45K words. It was only by 100 words, but that’s an extra sizable paragraph, right?

My Obstacles

For everyone in the United States, we’re quite aware what the challenge was for me this week: Thanksgiving holiday.

Yes, I got time off work. No, I don’t get time off from kitchen prep and post-meal dishes.

I’ll admit that I postponed taking on the NaNoWriMo writing challenge simply because Thanksgiving was in the month of November. Sure, it’s one day, but when family travels to get together, the holiday gathering lasts for days. And when my family doesn’t get to see me as often as they’d like to, that means they’d rather see me laughing in the living room rather then my face glued to my laptop.

They make a good case. So I had to think ahead before the festivities began.

I cranked out words like nobody’s business on the days prior to Thanksgiving. During the weekend, I got a sense of our family’s plans before structuring my day around when I need to wake up and hibernate with my word processor.

My Successes

Since I am a planner, I created an outline for the book before jumping into my NaNoWriMo draft.  During the first two weeks, I was worried that I wouldn’t be near completion on my manuscript by the time I reached 50K words.

By last night, I reached the middle of the book’s climax. That means about 5,000 words to wrap up the storylines for all the characters before typing THE END.

This could be considered both good and bad. 50K words really is closer to a novella than a novel. That means I’ll need to do some serious expansion on some characters and plot points.

But I consider this as a good sign. What I have now for National Novel Writing Month will be the first draft of the novel at 50K words. Sure it’s short, but it’s on paper. And I’d rather have a draft than no draft.

Of course the first draft sucks. It’s about first getting all my ideas onto the page, then being mentally ready to edit the monster…after the new year, of course. Because of this process, I’ve been taking notes on where I want to go back and change chapters or sections of the manuscript. It’s about tackling the editorial process one step at a time.

My Goals

With three days left in National Novel Writing Novel month, I think it’s pretty obvious what my goal is this week: Reach 50K words. If that means before November 30, awesome! If that means by 11:59 on the last day, that works too! I won’t need to clock myself with word pacing this week since the pressure’s on this week.

But enough about me. How’s your NaNoWriMo going? Will you reach 50K by Wednesday night? Share your progress below.