Fifty Thousand Words

Here it is the final day of NaNoWriMo and I’m a few words short of the fifty thousand word goal. Did you see what I did there? Fifty thousand is two words and 50,000 counts as one!

Bumps in the Road

I’ve been plugging away on my novel and even earned my 25 day badge for writing twenty five days in a row. (see picture above) But on day twenty seven I ran into a few bumps. There were the five hours spent shoveling after a snowstorm, then a holiday, followed by an unexpected family crisis (they’re always unexpected, aren’t they?), and a car stuck in the snow!

Playing Catch Up

So here I am trying to catch up from all that lost time. I need to write three hundred and fifty eight more words! To be this close and not achieve the goal is really hard. I was disciplined, I wrote every day for twenty six days. I religiously logged my progress on NaNoWriMo’s website. I left activities early so I could devote time to this project. My biggest mistake was setting my daily word count goal too low. The minimum is one thousand six hundred and sixty seven words (1,667) for 30 days. But the minimum is rarely enough.

Next Time

A better approach is to attempt two thousand or two thousand five hundred words a day. That allows for a day off here and there and makes it so the unexpected doesn’t derail you from meeting your goal. So on day twenty six I had a total of forty three thousand, seven hundred and thirty six words (43,736), an average of one thousand six hundred and eighty two words (1,682) a day.

Fifty Thousand Words

Now if you’re doing the math you will note that I need a lot more words than three hundred fifty eight to reach fifty thousand. So here’s what I did. I counted all my November emails, texts, and handwritten notes. I figure the goal is fifty thousand words, and I did write all those words even if they weren’t novel related! So this post should put me over the fifty thousand word mark. Almost there! Five, four, three, two, done!