A printed copy of the rough draft of my 2023 NaNoWriMo novel arrived in the mail today! When I finish a project like this, I always make a printed copy for my own shelf. Even if I never get around to editing it, I’ll have a reminder of what I accomplished and learned while writing that novel.

I am finished!

The final word count for the rough draft of Project River is 93,284 words, made with 506,000 keystrokes over the course of about 39 hours of drafting, for an average speed of about 40 words per minute. That’s 237 pages of double-spaced 11-point text.

My lowest day was November 1st with 1,993 words. Having a good baseline kept me motivated to never fall below it, even if several days were just barely above 2k. My highest day was November 11th with 5,925 words.

Thanks for everyone who followed along. If you’ve ever wanted to write a book, join me next year!

With 91,000 words, I have managed to beat my personal goal of 90k for this year. But my novel is not yet finished. There is still the final confrontation with the antagonist and the denoument to write. For the other writers out there, stay with it! We can finish this month strong!

I am now at 82,000 words, with daily average of 3,000 words. However, the amount I write each day varies from 2k to 6k depending on how much free time I have. What works for me to get all of those words down quickly is word sprints.

A word sprint is a timed period where you focus on writing as much as possible. My word sprints are based on the pomodoro technique. You write for twenty five minutes, then take a five minute break to focus on something else. I combine these thirty minute chunks into one to two hours of writing. After two hours, I take a longer break of at least twenty minutes.

When using these technique for words sprints, I write around 2,000 words an hour. This means that I can reach my daily word goal with three chunks of writing, or just an hour and a half a day.

Happy Thanksgiving! I hope you’ve been able to spend time with those you are thankful for today.

There’s just a week left of NaNoWriMo, and I’m at 66,500 words. I’m a little behind par, but close enough that I am not worried about it. I know that as long as I can write something everyday, I will keep the motivation to finish.

So far, I’ve written 56,680 words. Which is good, but I’ve only written half of the scenes that I have planned for this novel. Running the numbers, that means that if I keep at the same pace for over-running my estimated length of a scene, the final word count will end up being closer to 100-110k words.

There are three ways I could deal with this. I could go through all of my upcoming scenes and re-estimate the word count I will need based on how long similar scenes have taken so far. This is would take up too much time with such a tight deadline, and it doesn’t bother me if my estimates are off at this stage. I will probably review it in the future, so that my estimates in the future can be more accurate.

A second option would be to ignore the issue completely and just keep writing the same length of scenes. This would give me a rough draft where everything is equal, but the extra 10-20 thousand words would add three to seven extra days of writing, and I want the draft to be finished by the end of november.

Instead, I am going to write the scenes that most interest me to the same level as I have been, while writing the less interesting scenes in a combination of summary and drafting where I might summarize what will take too much time to write out fully. Then, if I decide to cut the scene, I won’t have wasted extra work.

I’m done! Kind of.

With 51,301 words total, I’ve managed to beat the official NaNoWriMo goal! Now just to get to my personal goal of 90k by the end of the month.

Things continue at a steady pace, though I am over-running my word goals for each each scene, and therefore slowly falling behind on my chapter goals.

I am now half-way to my goal, both in terms of days and words, with a total of 46,762.

I’ve gotten a free questions on the software that I use to write. I use Manuskript, which is free and open-source. It has several sections for managing characters, plots, world building, outlining, and writing.

This is just a short post to celebrate 5,925 words in a single day, split up over two writing sessions. I am now at at 35, 244 words total.