Alright, October was not a bad month. I got 4,000 words which pulled me through the rest of chapter 8 and a decent way into chapter 9. In total, I’m currently sitting at 43,500 words, and roughly halfway through the book. Celebration time!
Chapter 8, as I mentioned last month, is a slow burn. It gives the reader time to unwind and relax from the tense situations building in the first 7 chapters. It does, however, end with an interesting hook, which brings us to chapter 9. Our characters are in a new location, a new environment, and they have to figure out whether these zombies have spread. This is going to be another build chapter with a crazy ending. I’ve been thinking and rethinking on how to properly get this one across with the lore I’ve built up for the world, but one thing I enjoy doing is to discovery write within a chapter. I have a chapter-by-chapter outline, but getting from ‘A’ to ‘B’ within the chapter isn’t always how I initially envisioned it. Already in chapter 9, I ended up scrapping one aspect of my outline for an entirely new version because I thought it fit the story better.
Now, let’s talk about the title of this post. As some of you may know, November is National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo. I’ve never really taken full advantage of it before, but this year I came up with my own version as a goal for myself. For the entire month of November, I am going to write every single day. It may be upwards of one thousand words or as few as several dozen, but I want to continue making steady progress on this book. I’ve already taken almost an entire year and I just now hit the halfway point on the first draft. While realistically I can’t expect to hit 5,000 words a week like I did for Soulformer, I want to get up to a writing speed that won’t take three years to finish.
If this NaNoWriMo goal works well, I may go back to making weekly writing goals to make sure I’m more consistent with my writing. So far (for the past 6 days), I’ve been able to sit down and write a little bit every night. It hasn’t been too much, but it did boost my word count for this post. So who knows, maybe I’ll have a phenomenal month. Sure, it’ll be busy with the holidays starting up, but I’m optomistic.
Happy NaNoWriMo! Until next month!