NaNoWriMo 2015 Update #3

Wow! Thanksgiving Break has done wonders for my word count! When I got home on Tuesday night I was sitting at roughly 27,000 words, and now I am at 39,505. I can't believe I'm catching up! 50,000 is within sight! I'm actually going to make it! My challenge at this point will be filling up those last 10k words since I have already reached the climax of the story and am now in the denouement.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank Kristina Horner, a BookTuber that I follow. This is her tenth year doing NaNoWriMo, and for a while she was even further behind than I was in this year's endeavor. Despite the daunting amount of words she had to write to catch up, she has been determined all month long to make it to 50k and is now less than 10k to that goal. Her strong-willed determination to win NaNoWriMo has helped me feel encouraged throughout the month, even when it got to the point that I was 17k behind. Seeing her word count go up has helped me believe that mine could rise as well, and now both of us are going to make it to the finish line. So thank you, Kristina, for your encouragement this November.

I am currently at 39,505 words. And still going strong!

NaNoWriMo 2015 Update #2

I have not written a whole lot since my last update, and I completely blame college for that. Thanks to a test I was unprepared for, a book review that is due tonight that I still have not started, and a speech I have to give on Thursday, my time has been directed at other things this past week. I am currently 11,000 words behind in NaNoWriMo right now.

It also didn't help that I had a bad case of writer's block. I initially had planned for my story to kind of be in two parts, but once the first part was over and I entered the limbo when I introduce the next plot, I crashed into a cement wall and had to start digging through it to get to the other side and keep going. Fortunately I seem to have organized my thoughts a bit more and have now started down a newer, more exciting path than I thought I'd be taking. My novel's genre has also changed a couple of times over the course of this week, but I think it has mostly settled on thriller/suspense.

What encourages me is knowing that Kristina Horner - my role model in all things books - was even further behind than I am and is now catching up rather quickly. If she can do it, I can do it. I can still hit 50k.

I am currently at 17,136 words.

NaNoWriMo 2015 Update #1

The irony of my writing this blog post right now is that I am actually at a write-in, which is specifically designed to help participants focus on their stories and get words written down. In the past hour I have written all of 400 words (if that), and it's because there are two other people here with me - both boys - and they are playing their music very loudly and muttering to themselves and it is very distracting when I am the type of writer that needs total silence to get things done.

So, in light of this situation, I thought I'd at least do something productive and tell you about how NaNoWriMo has treated me so far.

I wrote 6,000 words on the first day, which was awesome. (I also only got three hours of sleep before teaching the pre-school class at my church, but y'know...sacrifices must be made.) Then I wrote a little over 2,000 words the following day, putting me three days ahead. After that I kind of slowed down a bit, writing a few hundred words here and there. On Thursday I got sick, so I only wrote one sentence. The next two days were just plain busy. My goal was to hit 15,000 words today (since that is where we are ideally supposed to be), but with the way this write-in is going and with work less than an hour away, I highly doubt that is going to happen. Maybe next time.

I am currently at 12,558 words.