Halfway Through = 20%

That's right - through the mystery that is "new math" - half of 100% is now 20%.  Or, more accurately, I am 20% done with the 50,000 first words of my new novel and the month of November is halfway over.

Could be worse.  I could be at 5,000 words instead of 10,000.  Funny thing is, very little has happened so far in my novel - just the random encounter with a dead guy.  So now what?

Well for starters, time to look on the bright side.  So I pulled up old NaNoWriMo report card spreadsheets to see where I was on the 15th.  Looks like in 2004 I had 19,645 words by today. 2005 saw 13329. 2006 I had 7392 words and still finished.  2007 - 15,563.  In 2008 I was a bit further along with 18,066. 2009 was somewhere in there but I can't find the file.  So the good news is that in no year so far that I have done NaNoWriMo have I been at 25K by today, and in every year I have finished.  The bad news is that this is the second fewest number of words I have had written at this point ever - 2006 being the exception.

Still, have no fear, I am sure something will happen to boost my wordcount (OK, I am not actually certain).  I'm currently averaging about 750 words a day, which is just under half of the 1667 I should have done, leaving me with about 160% at 2667 per day to finish out on time.  That's quite a bit, given that probably means I need to spend about 3 hours a day writing, and I normally have about 1 hour to 90 minutes to actually write.  In addition, there are two days this month where I will be driving and most likely write zero words.  Combine that with two other days where I most likely write nothing, and I'm looking at 3636 words a day for the remaining 11 days.  However, I (of course) have a couple of vacation buffer days built in where I can (if I can remain motivated) crank 10K or 14K in a single day.  We shall see.

So for now - I'll ignore the fact that I've written 388 words in this post.  Time to get back to writing.