NanoWriMo Day 20

Day 20 comes and I'm two thirds of the way through this adventure. No posts for a week, as I've been fighting with the real issues of NaNoWriMo ... all those feelings that are predicted in the plot! I got fed up and frustrated. After hitting 20K words, I was pretty sure that no-one will ever want to read this rubbish, so it took a few days to get going again.

And a couple of days in NaNoWriMo week means you're suddenly behind by 5K words ... tough to catch up. So I've been using my goal setting techniques on myself (see my LEJOG blog for more on goal setting). The most visual cue for getting the work out is my Excel spreadsheet, which is colour coded - red when I'm behind and black when I'm ahead. obvious really, but seeing the line of red from this week has really spurred me on to catch up today.

So, after several poor and mediocre days, today was fantastic. Over 6K words in a day (my record so far) took me through the 30K mark and on past 33,333 so that I'm actually ahead of schedule. I also checked out my MBA thesis today and ran the word count on that document. It was 28K words, so this novel is now definitely the longest work I have ever written ... and in just 20 days. I seem to remember the MBA thesis taking months. But I guess that included the editing ... and there's going to be a lot of that needed over the next few months.