NaNoWriMo Returns – Week 3 and Going Into The Final Stretch

In the Week 2 Update, I said that my goal for Week 3 was to hopefully complete chapter 4 by the end of the week and to have roughly 14,000 words in the bag. The first of those goals was going to be really tricky since I tend to overwrite chapters a lot and stick to my outline only in the most meta sense, but I was confident that I could do the second goal. I had done it in Week 2 and I had been traveling then, so no big deal.

Currently, this is what my project spreadsheet looks like:

As you can tell, it was a very busy week, very, very busy. There was a write-in last week on Saturday, which I had put together, but it ended up being just me there (sadface), which kinda sucked. It wasn’t that bad all-told, I got about 1,500 words down, sitting down at the cafe, guzzling a really good iced mocha. I got hit by a nasty cold in the middle of the week too, which I had feared would set me back considerably because the constant sneezing and watery eyes made sitting at the computer for any significant length of time very difficult. But I managed to push through all that nevertheless.

Days 16-18 were spent in a mad scramble to catch up with my writing since Day 15 had been such a big fat zero. I absolutely needed to hit 8,000 words by the fourth day if I wanted to stay on track for the week, and for my self-imposed goal of being able to eventually hit 60,000 words by the end of the month. Getting to that point was not easy. I had to do a lot of creative tricks in the narrative to accomplish that. I had to write a lot of descriptions, add in quite a few extra scenes. For those three days, my characters went through an incredible amount of hardships, one after another, with no rest.

I mean, first there was a house break-in (more like a mansion break-in), then a firefight in that mansion, with missile launchers and gunships involved. Then, when everything dialed down, my characters got ambushed AGAIN, this time right outside a medical facility. My head was full of casualty lists and action scenes for those three days. By the time I ended my writing session on Day 18, my brain was almost mush with all that writing and with my sniffle/sneezing.

Days 19-21, things got much better, mostly because I finally got to play up the science fantasy part of my novel, with the gods and stuff. The avatars finally started manifesting their powers, although I kept things limited, introducing the change in small doses. This is right in the middle of chapter four and my characters are freaked out of their minds trying to figure out what happened.

When I was doing NaNoWriMo last year, I don’t think I was writing so intensely then, as I’m writing now. Pretty much my entire night is given over to writing. An hour and a half to two hours is what I need each evening to hit my writing goals. I procrastinate some in that time, checking social media and forums, but I do that as “rewards”: I do word sprints of 500-700 words then take a few minutes off to cool down the mind. It keeps me sane and focused, so I don’t beat myself up too much about all the procrastinating.

For all of Week 3, in just 6 days, I wrote 15,587 words (week’s target was only 14,000 words!) for the novel. In August, I wrote 15,748 words for Project Dharmayoddha across 14 non-consecutive days. That’s the kind of intensity I’m talking about.

As it stands, I’m very happy with my progress on the project. You can tell by the tracker that I hit 50,000 words last night, and so have officially “won” NaNoWriMo. I just need to do what I’ve been doing so far, and I can hit not just 60,000 but 62,000 words very easily. If I stretch things out, there is a very remote chance that I could actually even make it all the way to 64,000 words. But that’s a very tall order at the moment. Will see how things played out.

Target: 14,000 words || 2,000 words daily || complete chapter 4, start chapter 5 and finish it!