NaNoWriMo 2015: Week 1

by
Scott D. Parker

NaNoWriMo 2015 Week 1 started strong, experienced a daunting roadblock, and ended well.

With 1 November also being the fall-back time, I woke a ‘regular body time’ which was 6:30…except the clock read 5:30am. With that ‘extra’ hour, I was able to bang out 3464 words on Sunday. The next day, the first work day, say a drop off, but that was to be expected since I had less writing time during the day. Tuesday was great because I got 1708 words before I went to work, surpassing the 1,667 needed per day to get to 50,000 words by month’s end.

Wednesday was the Day of Flexibility. My Mac crashed overnight. It would not even power on during my ‘writing hour’ of 5am. I shifted to keyboard+iPad and knocked out 1100 words, but had to make up the word count later that evening. Thursday was back to a normal day and Friday was an off day from the day job, so I upped the word count.

STATS

I’ve been keeping lots of stats. The newest one is writing speed. I time myself from beginning to ending of a section, usually a chapter. I calculate the words/minute and extrapolate to words/hour. I type pretty swiftly, especially when I’m on a roll or, when, say I don’t get up at the crack of 5am and am faced with less time to write and I want to reach my daily goal.

My favorite stat of the week is the pace. In order to reach 50,000 words in November, you have to write 1,667 words per day. By Day 6, with the 1,667 pace, you get to 10,002. By Day 6, I had reached 14,320 words, a difference of + 4,318. Made my day yesterday.

I'm listing these stats for one reason: for fellow writers who don’t have the luxury of having Writing as their day job. I have a day job. You probably have a day job. Writing books and stories is something I love. I make the time to do it. You can, too.

Check back here next week for another weekly update. Check my blog every day for my daily word count.

Overall weekly word count total: 14,320
Remaining to reach 50K: 35,680

NaNoWriMo! It can be done.