This year, I have joined the NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month, challenge. I have set myself two goals for the month of November. The first is to write an average of 1.000 words per day or 30.000 words in total for the month of November. And as a stretch goal I will try to get to the official NaNoWriMo goal of writing the first draft of a novel sized piece of work at 50.000 words, which comes down to an average of 1.667 words per day.

I will track my progress on this page, together with any thoughts on the day. And because a picture says more then 1.000 words I’ve added a nice graph.

Progress:

Current total	31.654
To go	-1.654
Average per day	1.055
Days left	0

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November 1st:

NaNoWriMo has started and so have I. I’m off to a good start and managed to get 1.711 words written. It took somewhere between 2.5 and 3 hours to get there, which is a decent speed. And now it’s time for bed, since I only managed to get started at around 21.00.

November 3rd:

The weekend is over. I managed to get over 1.000 words on average, which is more then I expected going into the weekend. I had friends over both on Saturday and Sunday, which limited the available writing time. But I got up an hour early this morning which added in 600 or so extra words.

The story itself is starting to flow nicely. It feels like it’s going somewhere.

November 5th

Progress over the last two days has been slow. Again, mainly due to social obligations. I’ve managed to add 1.000 words over two days, which is about as fast as expected. At the moment I’m 1.000 words behind on the 30.000 word goal. I think today will still be slow going. But catching up over the next couple of days should be possible.

November 13th

Progress over the past week has been varying a lot, as you can see from the graph above. The weekend was very slow going, with only a couple of hundred words a day. But the past three days I’ve written a lot. Today I managed to get 2.432 words down, and as a result I’ve almost caught up with my main goal of writing an average of 1.000 words per day for the month of November. I’m now only 533 words behind, compared to the 2.000 words I was behind after the weekend.

As for the official NaNoWriMo goal of 50.000, that’s well out of reach currently. I would need to write an average of 2.200 words for the rest of the month to make it to 50.000. Which is a lot. We’ll see how it goes. Whatever happens, at least I have 12.000 more words written down then I had at the start of the month

November 18th

The past five days have all been over 1.000 words, with an average of about 1.250 words per day. This has put me above where I need to be to get to 30k words by the end of the month. The words have been coming fairly easily these past couple of days, making it not hard to get to 1k+ words per day. Let’s see if I can keep it up for the next 12 days.

November 23rd

The end is in sight. Just a week left, and just a little over 5k words to go. The 30k words I’m aiming for is in reach. I’m on a 12 day streak of writing more then 1k words a day. At my current pace I should get over 30k on the 28th. We’ll see how it goes.

November 30th

Done! I made it, with a bunch of words to spare. And I managed to get something written each day of the month, which I’m pretty happy about (even if it was only a word or two a couple of days…). Time to relax and take a day or two away from writing.