NaNoWriMo Update #6

I've emerged from the depths! Can you believe it? I have a short update for yall who prefer my blogs in text, and then I am going to head back into the depths of my novel. Picture this as a surfacing-for-air for me.

For the stats inclined...

Counts		Document
Words:		37981
Characters (no spaces):		158596
Characters (with spaces):		196656
Paragraphs:		1258
Sentences:		3805
Pages (approximate):		72

And for the words inclined (though I probably shouldn't be wasting them on the blog), I am just 12000 words away from winning. According to the nifty little document that Karynna created (which we have fondly dubbed the Quotameter) I have to average 3000 words a day for the rest of the month.

I wrote 3000 words yesterday (Yes, on thanksgiving! - What, you think I have a life?), and it is totally doable. It actually, ironically, felt light. Even, dare I say it, downright easy. 3000 words is something like six pages of writing in Microsoft Word.

On Wednesday, when I last updated yall, I ended up writing 6000 words. I went to bed that night with a brain that could be best described as a pile of gelatinous mush, but I went to bed feeling ridiculously competent and accomplished.

I did break it up into different writing sessions. I wrote 2000 from 4-6pm at my apartment, 3000 when I could no longer stand being at my apartment and went to La Madeline and sat in on a write-in with some other Austin NaNoers, and another 1000 words when I got home and thought "I could totally make my ambitious quota today. Screw my safety!"

Something I have noticed during this month (which I mentioned to Siobhan in an email yesterday) is that while yes, I have suffered from a crazy high level of writers block, the nature of this competition is to just keep writing, and write on through that writers block. In the past, I have had a tendency to wait for perfection and just suffer through weeks of internal debate and angst, and nanowrimo has forced me to just push any and all writers block behind me, because if I spend too much time faffing about not writing I lose time. And time is words.

I hope everyone had a great thanksgiving yesterday (ours was so ridiculously delicious that I cleared my plate twice). I can tell you that I am thankful for many things... and one of those things is my awesome family who just lets me go along with this crazy-stupid writing challenge!

Back to my novel! Huzzah!

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Today's ambitious goal is: 43000
Today's slightly-more-realistic-goal is: 41000