I know NaNoWriMo is the National Novel Writing Month – “National Novel Writing Seventeen Days” wouldn’t fit on the merchandise – but I’ve just exceeded the 50K target words in a little over half the month.

It’s all about finding time to write where you can, having the determination to hit the daily target and, of course, getting into parts of the story that want to be written.

After a slow start, I opted to focus on one part of this “story of five parts”.  This is the part led by Mindy, fresh from The Abandoned.  Whilst it would help to read The Abandoned before this, it’s not hugely essential.  However, as my stories form part of a series, it would be true to say that you’ll appreciate this story more by reading the other stories that feature Mindy first (that’d be Clipped Wings, Murder! at Etheridge Hall, and The Abandoned).

I haven’t yet decided if each part of this story will have its own title, but I’ve tentatively called it “The Girl with No Name”.  That doesn’t really encapsulate what the story is about, but it’ll do for now.  This draft runs for 40,876 words, which is more than I expected (at this rate, the whole thing would hit 200K, but I don’t really want it to go further than 150K).  I may have to split this further down the road, if I don’t lose much in the editing.

It’s hard to believe that, just over seventeen days ago, I had little to no confidence that I’d be able to do NaNoWriMo this year.  Lack of time, particularly in November, is always the key issue – one that I’d made worse for myself this year having taken up running in my spare time.  Running is addictive, and it always conflicts with the concept of sitting on your chair typing 50,000+ words.

In addition to that, my workload has just increased, making it less and less likely that I would hit my daily target, much less exceed it.  Despite all of that, it has only taken 17 days.

Normally, after hitting the NaNo target, interest in the project dwindles away, which leads to lots of red blobs on the NaNo calendar chart.  I now have to try and find the time (and the enthusiasm) to continue.  I’m hoping that won’t be a problem this year, due to the way my story is structured.  Every 30-40K words, I switch to another mini-story.  That should keep the excitement going.

Day 17, word count: 51,145, target: 28,333.