NaNoWriMo - Day 13

November thunders on and my word count creeps ever higher. I just wish I was sprinting up the 50,000 word mountain, rather than limping towards the summit.

I can write approximately 1,000 words an hour by hand, so a couple of hours will result in a fairly healthy word count. I consider this to be a pretty good performance since I know that there are folks out there that can't produce at that rate either by hand or at a computer or typewriter. However, when you're lagging behind your target by over 10,000 words, 1,000 words an hour seems terrifyingly slow.

When you think about it, 1,000 words an hour by hand really isn't that slow: I get an average of just over 200 words per A4 page, so I'm churning out five pages an hour. Unfortunately, no matter how much I want to, I can't do anything to speed up. There's an advantage of writing by hand as my word rate doesn't really vary, even when I'm not motivated, but I also can't hurry up when I'm slipping behind.

This week has brought three early shifts at work, which involve getting up at 4am (or earlier) and then forcing myself to stay awake for at least eight hours. By the time I get home, especially on the first couple of days, I'm usually so tired that my brain is mush and my amoeba-like thoughts are just floating around in the goo. I have been known to fall asleep while eating or drinking, the latter in particular is quite untidy since I usually wake up when I either spill my coffee in my lap, or all over the floor. Sometimes it surprises me that I'm not drooling in front of the TV and I'm sure that sometimes I am! So this week, finding the time to write hasn't been the issue; finding a coherent thought has. Thankfully I'm on my first of three late shifts and I've arranged a half day off on the last one so I can go to the Friday night write-in. After that I'm off work until after my holiday, so there will be plenty of time to catch up.

10,000 words is a lot to think about in terms of hours, but it's not so bad when I remember that there's still 9 days left until the holiday, and 17 days left in November. I only need to write an extra 1,000 words per day to claw back my target and that's only 1 hour extra each day. (Let's not think about Christmas or moving house, shall we.)

NaNoWriMo Stats - Day 13
Normal NaNoWriMo target: 21,671
Target for finishing early: 30,953
Frontloading target: 43,333
Current wordage: 19,556 (-2,115, -11,397, -23,777) and there are still hours left in the day!