NaNoWriMo Week 3 – Recalibration

NaNoWriMo 2017 Participant BadgeRemember last week how I said I should be able to catch up in my word count? I was too ambitious. A combination of real-life events and the necessity of tweaking my website sidetracked me.

While I did rewrite half of the outline for the story, I’ve only been able to poke at my word count. My best day was 1129 words, still short of pace if I had been caught up. My worst day? 66 words. In order to catch up to NaNoWriMo pace and finish on time, I would have to do about 3,500 words a day. That’s doable if I had eight hours a day to write.

Unfortunately, I don’t. I’m lucky to have two. So I’m going to keep writing but recalibrate the goal. Originally I wanted to get a novella rough draft of 20,000 words. That is going to be my goal for the end of November. I doubt it will all be on one project, but I want to knock out the bulk of the rough draft.

Does it violate the rules of NaNoWriMo? Yes. Do I really care? No. My goal is to have words on the page that didn’t exist before. Maybe next year I will be able to proudly announce that I’m a winner.