NanoWriMo - Once Again into the (Writing) Breach

UPDATE 11/21/19: After hitting 30K+ by day 14 and realizing I could continue writing - and easily hit 50K by Nov 30th - I decided the best decision right now wasn’t to write another 20K of first draft material. What I needed to do was edit and publish the half dozen first drafts I already had laying around on my hard drive (some of which were from previous NaNoWriMos).

So that’s what I’m doing. Not sure if I’m going to polish off a 40K novella I wrote last year or finish up the 6 short stories I wrote for NaNoWriMo this year. Doesn’t matter, really - the point is to put at least one more book up before year-end.

UPDATE 11/4/19: Due to technical issues with the NaNoWriMo site, word count updates are not happening for me (and many others). Much as I would have liked to use the site to stay motivated, I’m not going to bother hammering a broken beast when I should be writing. I’ll post updates here at the bottom of this post instead and swing by the NaNoWriMo site later in the month to see if they got it fixed.

***

Welp, I am once again formally tossing my writing hat into the NaNoWriMo ring.

My first attempt in 2009 was surprisingly a success, but I’ve only managed to snag another one since then:

I give myself pass on the 2010 attempt, as I was hit by a car while crossing the street just a few days into that year’s NaNoWriMo. The others? 2011 was a victim of not having plotted nearly as well as I should have. 2012 I didn’t even bother trying, as I knew I didn’t have the bandwidth.

2013 was a success as I was coming back to writing after a break, and I had crafted a solid and detailed plot to go by (though I will admit that I was flinging anything and everything at the wall just to hit my 50K work count).

2014 was a bust, and 2018 was a close-but-no-cigar effort (I hit Thanksgiving and pretty much lost all steam).

This year should be interesting, and, hopefully, a win. Instead of focusing on a single novel, I’m stringing together a series of short stories. It feels an awful lot like my Daily Story Seeds project, and I think the constantly-changing-story and much-shorter-format approach will allow me to maintain the level of productivity I need to hit the 50K word count goal.

I managed to knock out over 2,000 words today, for example, and I really didn’t have a ton of time for writing.

If you’re a writer and attempting NaNoWriMo this year, shoot me a buddy request on their site - my user ID is scottiswriting (‘natch!). Regardless, I’ll post updates here over the course of the month.

***

Running Totals

Day / Word Count / Total Word Count

1 / 1667 / 1667

2 / 653 / 2320

3 / 2731 / 5051

4 / 1871 / 6922

5 / 1939 / 8861

6 / 1998 / 10859

7 / 2529 / 13388

8 / 815 / 14203

9 / 2982 / 17185

10 / 547 / 17732

11 / 3134 / 20866

12 / 3312 / 24178

13 / 4546 / 28846

14 / 1526 / 30372