NaNoWriMo - 36,005 words so far

I've written quite a bit less this week. According to the NaNoWriMo site, week two is the traditional time for writers to slow down or drop out.

The edits for Pumpkinnapper came in, and I have to work on them. I also had to finish my November 23 guest blog post, titled I Write Regency for the Simply Romance Reviews blog.

Excuses, excuses. Yes, I know. But, life does have a way of intruding on the best-laid plans.

This week the writing was much harder than last week. I checked the MS Word word counter a lot. Did I make xxxxx yet? Last week the words flowed fairly easily. Now I grit my teeth and force myself to write something. For all the talk about "writing every day", you must do some prep work before you write. This past week I've reached quite a few of those gray areas.

The good news: I have 14,000 words to write. Not counting today, when I'll work on Pumpkinnapper, I have fourteen days left. I can make the time to write 1000 words a day. Update next week.

After I'd written this post, I read this week's NaNoWriMo motivational email from Chris Baty. I planned to write in sequence until I hit 50,000 words. He says to write the whole story, then in December go back and flesh it out. I have at least three major scenes before "The End", since I expect this novel's final version to contain 90,000 to 100,000 words. I doubt these three scenes will total 14,000 words, but by writing them, maybe I can spare some tooth enamel.

Now for the week's shameless promotion. On Friday I guest blogged at Lynda Coker's Between The Lines blog on Where to Find Romance--in a Book, That is. Lynda told me my post received 207 hits on Friday. I'm a little below her weekly average of 2200 (314 per day), but I'm probably not doing too badly for a newbie. The post is still up, and I'll continue to check for comments over the next few days.

Thank you all,
Linda