NaNoWriMo Day 30... just, ugh.

1667 words a day. That sounds so... easy, doesn't it?

But 1667 words takes dedication, luck, and an easy to control schedule. It doesn't account for sick days (I've come down with a terrible cold which is only now subsiding), or holidays (I spent the Thanksgiving week either traveling to Houston or spending time with my dad who was visiting from Phoenix, and wrote nothing for three whole days).

I also tried driving for Uber (look back on how badly that turned out), got incredibly serious about finding at real job again, and of course I took the weekends off to spend with my wife and daughter. Well, I took the first two weekends off. I spent late nights during the last two trying to catch up.

All in all, I think I had about seven full days to write, plus half days or two-hour blocks here and there. For me, that's enough. Heck, I can write 1500 words per hour if I have a good idea where I'm going.

And that, my friends, is why I entered the last two days with 10k words remaining. Like I said before, I can't write without a good outline to tell me where I'm going. I start going down an inconsequential path or I forget that a new plot point contradicts a major past or future one and suddenly all my writing is lost. So, when I had to reconsider something major around the 25k word mark, it threw me into a three-day planning binge where I wasted three of my seven full days reworking my outline to account for the changes.

If it weren't for NaNoWriMo ending today, I could have, and I would have, spread those last 10k words out over the next month which, since my novel will be about 90k words in the end, is something I would be doing anyway. NaNoWriMo was merely a waypoint, not the beginning, nor the end of my writing. I plan to finish the week before Christmas, but without the specter of NaNoWriMo hanging over my head, that's a slightly flexible goal.

Anyway, in case you absolutely need to know, I marathoned my way through those last 10k words between yesterday and today. It helps that I was writing set of key action scenes which goes much more easily and quickly than, say, a dialogue-heavy exposition scene.

I thought I'd be blogging more during NaNoWriMo... ha! Not with that 1667 word a day whip at my back.

Whatever topic I promised to get to last time, I'll write about when I recover. I promise that will be sooner than the last time between my blog posts.