NaNoWriMo Update: Week 1

It's my first year attempting National Novel Writing Month, which is defined as writing 50K words in a month. Going into it last week, I was completely uncertain if I'd be able to pull it off. And I'm still far from certain, but after 9 days I have 21,780 words in my document. That's ahead of the scheduled 1,667 per day, but I'm trying to finish before Nov 25 (I'm guessing that whoever scheduled this thing in November wasn't responsible for school-aged children who have the full week off nor was planning to host a Thanksgiving dinner!)

It has been a new experience for me to sit down by 10am and tap out 4K words before school pickup. I've had a few days where I didn't get focused enough and so had to carry on in the evenings, but overall I've been shocked by how fast I can write when I'm trying: I can generate 500 words in 20 minute sprints,  although the pace decreases to about 1K/hour overall, given breaks and such.

My biggest problem is looking to be that the novel is coming in close to my estimate of 30K words, which is acceptable for middle grade, especially considering I'll need to weave in setting descriptions and emotional explanations, but that will be much slower. So my current plan is to try to generate the balance to "win" NaNoWriMo by writing pure setting, character description and backstory. It could be a waste of time in order to reach the rather arbitrary goal, but I have found it useful in the past to write these pure descriptions and then pick the best sentences to weave in.

So, so far so good. Apparently, I can do it for nine days anyway, at least if I have a novel planned out.  Happy writing, everyone!