After Five Days...

Five days into NaNoWriMo... and my word count stands at: 4073 words! That's right, Friday's production was a meager 414 words, with nothing added on either Saturday or Sunday (the scary thought is that I expected about that much production from the weekend...)

Here is the really scary part... I am now about 2.5 days behind on basic word count.

I read a blog post from a former classmate of mine... ( www.staceycochran.com )

"I have written a little bit each day for the past four or five days. Some days it's only a few hundred words, but if you write just some each day, eventually you'll get a whole novel written. The current word count is 18,773 at 97 pages. That is a solid 1/4 of a novel, and that thought makes me feel content and happy.

"It's just amazing to me how a novel comes together every time. Some novels you write in three weeks; some have taken me three years. This current one feels slow sometimes, but even at this pace, I'll have 70,000 words in a total of six months.

"The key is to just write some every day, even if it's only a couple of paragraphs."

I guess that's the reassurance and the logic that I keep coming back to... I'd like to get to the 50,000 word mark by the end of the month, but if I don't, at least I'm closer to a completed novel than I was when I started the month. That is also part of what caused my hangups from Friday (other than it just being a Friday and having to handling a lot of calls) is that I was trying to plug through a slower segment near the beginning, just before reintroducing the primary character into society... I have the feeling that I will inevitably have to either cut or rework much of the current segment that I am working on...

Such is the life of a writer, I guess...