Seven of Thirty

I have both good news and bad news re:NaNoWriMo today. The good news is that yesterday I was able to get up to 11,561 out of 11,667, which is a few hundred words ahead of the catch-up schedule I set for myself when I fell behind on day six. The bad news is that I have just exhausted my outline. It took me in the neighborhood of 2-4 hours to compose that thing, and while I have some jumping points for another arc, I’m going to need to actually plot it out (I could try to discovery write it, but experience tells me that my discovery writing devolves into meandering incoherence after about 10,000 words, at which point my will to continue the story is badly drained – this might be able to get me to limp across the finish line if I run into this problem again on day 24, but here on day seven I need another outline). That’s about the same amount of time as the Write-In on day four that got me double the words I needed for the day. All of day eight could be lost to outlining just as I’m starting to recover from getting distracted on day six. I may need to write 2k per day for a couple of days to catch up afterwards.

The good news is that I can discovery write for up to about 10,000 words if I have to, which means if this happens to me again in the final days of the month, when there’s not enough days left in November to spread out the damage of missing one, I can just plow ahead with no outline at all.