I admit that this year has been more of a struggle for me. I will presume this has to do with writing the 2nd half of a novel instead of starting at the beginning. NaNovices beware. Don’t do this until you have a better sense of your process and flow. This is why the good folks at NaNo HQ tell you not to.

With that said, I’m doing well, ahead of the pace for 50k, but far behind my blistering word count from last year. As of Saturday (the official midpoint I was at 29,609. At the end of today, I stand at 33,155. So which makes the entire Dakotashi 2 novel about 83k so far. I was hoping for 100k, but as I’m through the climax now, I doubt I will get that far. I did forget to write a scene–one of those things I thought of, but didn’t write down on an Scrivener index card and therefore skipped. Oops. So I still have the skipped scene (or two) and several wrap up scenes to write.

Then I’m going to try pantsing it for the rest of the month on a new project that I’m pretty excited about. But I still expect the pantsing experiment to be a spectacular failure as I seem to need to map of where I’m going in a novel in order to get there, but we shall see. I’m hoping that I’ve matured in my writing some since the last time I tried writing without a plan, but if I need to in order to keep going, I will allow myself some brainstorming and plotting.

I want to get to 50k no matter what.

The first day of National Novel Writing Month 2014 is just about over and I am off to a good start. With the kick-off party/write-in, where I ate too much, sat next to my writing bestie and kicked butt in a couple word wars, plus the words sprints I did later in the day, I got to 5,500 words.

If I keep up this pace, I will reach my goal of 50,000 on November 10!! hahahaha. That’s what the NaNo chart says when I entered my word count says anyway. The beginning of the month is usually easier for me, so we’ll see how it goes, but I know I can finish. I’m actually worried about whether I have enough scenes left in my book! Since I’m writing the 2nd half of my Dakotashi sequel (so many untitled books for me!), this could be problematic.

The “ticking clock” in this book is not subtle at all. When I started this morning Dakotashi had 4 days left to do what he needed to do. By the end of the day it was 3. Can three days use up 44,500 words? We shall see!