NaNoWriMo – Week 1

In my last post, I announced that I was participating in National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, and committing to writing at least 50,000 words of first draft text for my sequel novel in the month of November. So how am I doing?

Well, up until yesterday, quite well. I beat the daily quota of 1,667 words every day. My typical weekday consists of my part-time job, starting at about 7 am (I work remotely for my old job in Syracuse, so that’s 9 am for them). I work until about noon or sometimes an hour or two later, then eat lunch and start writing. I had expected to bang out the 1,667 words in a couple hours each day, and that turned out to be about right.

Yesterday (Nov 7), I was planning on stopping work early around 10:30, and was hoping to get a head start on the writing as well as some other projects around the house. Unfortunately, my daughter got word that the AirBnB house that she manages had water in the basement due to a plumbing issue. The owners are out of the country, so it was up to her and her husband to resolve the situation. My wife Cindy and I volunteered to help, and we spent the rest of the day pumping out the water and cleaning things up. Life happens.

After that was over, I was pretty tired, and so I ended up not writing anything that day. In retrospect, I’m trying to establish a goal of writing every day, and I should have spent 20 minutes in the evening writing, even if it only netted about 300 words. But I didn’t.

Here’s a table showing how much I wrote each day:

Fortunately, since I exceeded 1,667 every day, I have some margin overall on the goal to reach 50,000 words by the end of the month. As you can see in the table, I was 652 words ahead of target before the basement debacle, so I only really have 1,015 words to make up, which I can do this weekend by hitting 2,000 words per day Friday-Sunday.

I’ll post again next week, so you can see if I recovered and got back on track.

In the meantime, here are three promotions of free sci-fi e-books (including my novella, The Worth of a World).  Check them out, you’re sure to find something you’ll enjoy!

Author: RickAAllenSF

Semi-retired engineer, now a SF author. Recently moved to Colorado Springs, where I work in front of a window looking out at Pikes Peak. View all posts by RickAAllenSF