Welcome to my blog on how I’m doing at NANO WRIMO this year!
How Things Started
I started this month with my novel at around 34k words and my estimate for length was 80-90k so I figured it would be doable to finish the book during NANO WRIMO. I was also coming off my warm-up month where I wrote over 30k words across all of my projects. That was my highest word count for any month this year. November is currently sitting at the second-highest month at the halfway point!
How They are Now
Now things have shifted a lot this month as they often do when drafting a novel. One of the biggest things is that I believe it will end up being a bit longer than my initial projections seeing as I passed the 60k mark in my book on November 15th. This is not a great shock to me because I tend to be a bit of an overwriter. My last novel was supposed to be around 43k words and it ended up at 71k even after editing it down a bit. Every day the story develops and I am mostly happy with the results but we will see what my writing group has to say. We will see whether I end up finishing the book this month or extending it to next month because it is still growing.
What Happened in Between
The month so far has not been easy. I’ve had one major setback in that I got a cold which turned into a sinus infection so even as I write this right now I feel like drilling a hole in my face to relieve the pressure and pulling out all my teeth to get rid of the pain and there is nothing like steady constant pain to make it difficult to get into a good writing headspace. However, I am determined to push through and win NANO this year, and keeping myself ahead of where I need to be is crucial because once I get behind it snowballs. There were two days that I was minorly behind and I fixed that as soon as I could. This change in mentality has done wonders for me.
What’s Next?
Hopefully, my sinus infection will go away and the healing from that will propel me into an even more productive week next week. That would be nice so I could actually enjoy thanksgiving and all the good food. I’m going to be at the beach this year again thanksgiving and I look forward to walking on the beach with my mug of tea and hanging out with my puppy for the week as well as getting lots of extra words in and some much-needed rest.
A Bit About the Story
My story has evolved a lot and in that I mean it has become more magical. I was trying to write something that was more “realistic” and only magic adjacent but that went out the window pretty quickly and I’ve pushed more and more toward it ever since. I don’t want to give too much away and spoil it but I will say, maybe it’s a good thing to keep some doors shut.
I hope that those of you who are joining in on NANO WRIMO 2022 are doing well and hitting your goals and I plan to put a NANO update up at the end of the month/beginning of December. I’ve also put my stats below for those of you who enjoy numbers.
Raw Stats:
Day 1- 2,035 words
Day 2- 1,791 words
Day 3- 1,983 words
Day 4- 1,705 words
Day 5- 1,169 words
Day 6- 2,145 words
Day 7- 2,169 words
Day 8- 576 words
Day 9- 650 words
Day 10- 1,882 words
Day 11- 2,027 words
Day 12- 3,728 words
Day 13- 2,385 words
Day 14- 1,020 words
Day 15- 1,509 words
Total for the first 15 days- 26,774
