I’m counting it as a success. I wrote 32,778 words in November. Given the family demands of the Thanksgiving holiday, and the fact that my guy’s birthday was two days before, I didn’t participate in the final push that a lot of people do at the end of the month. I pretty much wrapped up on the 25th, so for 25 days I averaged about 1300 words a day.
I didn’t get to the 50,000 word mark, but I’m happy, so it’s a qualified success.
The great part is, I wasn’t starting from scratch. I had a draft, and an outline for what I wanted to do. Those almost 33,000 words got me up over the 70,000 mark on my project. I don’t know if I’ll finish a draft before the end of the year. I was aiming for 100,000 words total, so I will have to keep up my 1300 word/day pace, which will be a challenge. Also, I’m into more fine tuning, adding detail and backstory, so it’s much slower going than it was in November.
So it seems that it would make sense at this point to stop counting words, and instead count hours. Because it doesn’t have to be long, it just has to be good.
[…] Last year I kind of participated. I used the NaNoWriMo framework as motivation to re-write a significant portion of my novel and I averaged about 1,300 words a day. Not bad, and it was fun to feel a part of something that so many writers participate in, but it was not in the true spirit of NaNoWriMo, and I fell about 18,000 words short of a “win.” […]