Monday 27 November 2017

Weekly Update: November 19 to 25

 Weekly word count: 14 122

With only a few days left to go in NaNoWriMo, I'm feeling pretty good about my progress.  If I can keep up this kind of pace, then I think I've got a good chance at being able to get my companion series manuscript ready to pitch for July.  (I also really need to figure out a title for it.)

As you can see, I was struggling with writing on Wednesday and Thursday.  I've been fighting a nasty cold and decided to get some sleep rather than pushing myself to stay up late.  It was a difficult decision for me.  I was fighting some depression and was thinking that if I didn't stay up to write, there was no way that I could achieve my NaNo goal.  But I was also falling asleep at my keyboard, so I decided to choose my health.

The next day I was in a more reasonable frame of mind.  And the extra sleep helped my creativity so that I was able to write more than I think I would have been able to if I'd pushed myself.  Lesson learned.

I took a look at my outline and decided to up the estimated final word total to 125 000.  I'm almost at 100 000 words and there's between six and eight chapters left to go.  

I've had to be careful not to conflate finishing NaNo with finishing the novel.  There's probably another 10 to 15k which will have to be written after I reach my 50 000.  So I'm going to hold off booking my edits until I have the draft complete.  I'm keeping my fingers crossed that I can get book 4 out and on the market before the spring conferences begin in May.

I've also started to look at what needs to happen after I get this draft done.  I need to get the second editions of the first three books ready (the only changes are to the front and back matter and changes to the tag lines for the covers) and then get them into wide distribution.

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