Technically I did not win NaNoWriMo 2021, this is really a participation trophy, lol. After my relatively strong start I never did rally after burning out at the start of the third week. My final word count for November is 30, 073. Which honestly is still pretty good for me to write in one month. I was really hoping to at least hit 40,000 words but I just haven’t mentally been in writing mode the last couple weeks. This is mostly because of my day job and finishing up my second B.S. degree. But I’m turning in my final assignment this weekend and then I’m done with school! My day job is still pretty busy but I think it’s finally calmed down enough to go back to the regular forty hour work week. Yay.
My plan was to have the first draft of Book Two completely done by the end of December which would give me all of January to review it before handing it over to my editor in February. In order to meet this self imposed deadline I would need to write at least another 40,000 words in December. Given that I only wrote 30,000 in November I think this is unrealistic. Also so far I’m pretty confident in what I’ve written, I don’t think I’ll actually have to spend much time revising my first draft other than some fact-checking. This book is a little complicated because I have to make sure certain timelines make sense. I take a lot of notes as I go but at some point I’m going to need to spend some time building out a timeline to use as a reference, I just haven’t had time to look around and find an app I like that will help me create it. I could make something manually but I’d prefer to find something where I just enter a comment with a date range and it magically appears on a timeline. I have no doubt something or multiple somethings like this exist. I just have to find it.
So instead of trying to shoot for an unrealistic writing goal I’m changing my plans up a bit. My goal is to hit 60,000 words by the end of December which means I’ll have to write another 30,000 words this month. Given that the 30,000 I wrote in November I mostly wrote over a two week period, I think this is doable. Then in January I’ll add another 15,000-20,000 words and do a quick review. I’m targeting an 85,000-90,000 final word count. But I don’t necessarily have to be at this word count when I give the book to the editor. I’d much rather add more scenes to fill out character development or plot points than cut a bunch of scenes and figure out how to rework the story. I’m really excited to dive back into things next weekend. I’m taking Friday off so I’ll have a three day weekend and lots of time to write! The next few chapters are going to be fun to write too. We’re finally going to see what that vision Kaysea had in A Shift in Shadows was all about : )