So 15 days down, 15 days to go. I thought I should write a few words as a bit of an update.
First off – 50k, man. That’s a lot of words. Technically, I’ve already won NaNoWriMo. You don’t really win NaNoWriMo, but as I said in the first post, the typical goal is 50000 words, and I’ve already hit that.
However, as I also said in that first post, my goal was 120000 words. I no longer expect to hit that, for two reasons.
Firstly, I think I overestimated how much story I had in the first place. I know there are parts that I’ve glossed over or sped through, but I reached the end of the adaptation of my screenplay to this book at about 48000 words. I think that’s partly because movies need to move at a faster pace than books, and they also need to be more concise, have less in them. Because I did almost a straight conversion, that’s why it’s not as broad. It also means that the book at the moment moves at a lightning pace, which I need to slow down. It’s also why my writing pace has slowed down in the last couple of days. I’ve stopped hammering through the adaptation and started coming up with completely new stuff again. Basically, it means I have to really start thinking about what I’m writing again, which slows the actual writing down.
Secondly, 120000 words is a lot. It was an ambitious goal from the start, but if I’d had enough story I think I could have hit it. But because I’ve run out of screenplay to adapt, and because my pace has slowed, I think I’ll be lucky to hit 100000 words. Definitely by the end of November. Overall, maybe the book will still run to that kind of length, but 100000 means just about maintaining the pace of the first two weeks, which to me seems plausible, but only if I can hit the same kind of stride I was hitting at the beginning. Which will only happen if I get into a real rhythm by coming up with more story that just flows out of me. Which may or may not happen. It’s a special but rare kind of thing when that happens, so… we’ll see.
Anyway, I’ve rambled a lot on this one, so I’ll wrap it up now. No matter what I end up with come the end of November, I’ll be happy with what I’ve accomplished so far, let alone what I manage over the remaining two weeks. But again, we’ll have to wait and see.