Day’s word count: 2329
Total word count: 50,505
Writing location: home
Work: off
Exercise: heading off to ride 20-30 miles on Rouvy to celebrate!
Notes
DONE!
Although I didn’t plan for this to be another last-minute finish, it’s not the first time (2021 & 2022 were last-day finishes, too), and at least I didn’t have to write 6000 words on the last day like I did in 2022.
This year’s graph is pretty consistently upward after the slow start. I stacked the deck against myself on purpose and it shows. Plus I was working several long days in a row on the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd, so even if I’d set myself up for success I still would have started off slow, if not quite as slow.
One of the things I love about these graphs is you can see when the book started speaking on its own. It’s obvious that this happened in the last week or so.
Although I started the last day of the month only needing 1814 words, I counted 2329 just so the “final” word count would be a neat 50505. I put final in quotation marks because it’s actually almost 52,000 words now, and will be another 100,000-word book when the first draft is finished, although it won’t be anywhere near Eileen’s 190,000-word monster. My goal for finishing the first draft is January 26 because grad school starts again on the 27th.
I plan on touching the book very little in December. Another goal I set myself every year for the last several years is to read 20,000 pages. I’m at 16,337 now, so I need to read about a hundred pages a day to hit that, so I’ll be busy flipping pages instead of writing them.
I saved the Richard-Eileen first kiss scene for today. I knew it would be fun, and it was a treat to myself for making it through November.
I’ll be posting my reflections on the month sometime tomorrow, then the blog goes back to the normal five-day schedule. For the next eleven months, at least… assuming NaNoWriMo still exists a year from now. (More on that tomorrow.)
Until then, I’m just going to enjoy my profile picture getting that fifth leaf on its laurel!
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