What Just Happened? An Incomplete Journey of a NaNoWriMo Newbie – Part 2

Journal Entry: NaNoWriMo 2021 Day 1: And So It Begins…

So, the alarm went off at 4 AM with a note: “NaNoWriMo Wake Up.” Right. I said I was going to do that. After coffee, a look at the news, a moment of meditation to rid myself of the stink of the news, and another cup of coffee, I managed to whip out 1,747 words in the morning. I added another 1,052 words around lunch and more in the afternoon. This does put me on pace of >= 1,667/day.

Oddly (or perhaps expectedly), I spent the previous night wondering if I picked the right story. It was just the day before that I considered the possibility of writing something completely different. Instead, this morning I have placed that idea (or those ideas, since there were a few) into a folder called “For Later Consideration.”

Journal Entry: NaNoWriMo 2021 Day 2: I Need Stinking Badges

NaNoWriMo is built with gamification in mind, meaning as I complete various milestones I am awarded a badge. I like badges, even if they’re only for me. The psychology behind this thinking is well-known and has been around for a while. I am living proof, and even if my 4 AM wake up turned into a 4:30 AM wake up with a “damn it all” thought running through my head, I was able to punch out another 1,316 words before having to jump on work calls at 6:30 AM. I now have 6 badges. (Update: another 1,075 words in the afternoon.)

Journal Entry: NaNoWriMo 2021 Day 3: Work Sucks

I really am glad I plotted this out. I don’t think I would be able to keep this pace up if I had to think about what came next. It does not help that this week my work day starts at 6:30 AM every morning except Monday. And while I really need to put in a few extra hours at the day job, I feel it is important–for this week at least–that keep a solid pace. Perhaps when I am an uber-rich author who can live off his royalties, I will be able to put in more hours each November. Maybe I could even write the 50,000 words in two weeks. At this pace, I could. 4,032 words today. Take that, Day Job.

Journal Entry: NaNoWriMo 2021 Day 4: Why Didn’t I Try This Before?

Oh, right. Life. It gets in the way sometimes, as it did today. The dogs needed grooming and work took its revenge. All I could manage was 1,056 words in the morning and a meager 569 in the afternoon. Still, my running mean is okay at 3,081 and I could conceivably finish by the 20th.

Journal Entry: NaNoWriMo 2021 Day 5: Stats!

I love statistics. That is not to say I loved the class and all the math I had to perform when a simple program configured correctly could spit out the correct answer in a pretty chart. Rather, I love numbers and seeing patterns in the chaos that is around us, of taking something as creative as, say, writing, and reducing it to means and box and whisker charts and histograms. The NaNoWriMo site gets me. There is a page of line graphs and means and more. I also created my own table below to chart my progress. It’s not as pretty as what’s on the NaNoWriMo site, but it’ll do for this post.

Journal Entry: NaNoWriMo 2021 Day 6: The First Saturday

As hoped, Saturday did lend itself to an increased word count. Over the course of the day, in spurts of 30-minute to 1 1/2-hour writing sessions, I managed to come up with 4,373 words. They probably aren’t the best words, but this month is about quantity not quality.

Journal Entry: NaNoWriMo 2021 Day 7: One Benefit to Time Change

There are many complaints about the biannual tradition of changing the clocks, but we hear very few positive things. Whether or not this was intentional, the fact that NaNoWriMo occurs during the month when you get an extra hour of sleep (or have an extra hour to write in the morning because your body thinks it’s 5 AM when it’s really only 4 AM and you’re up at, what? 3 AM?) is noteworthy. For what it’s worth, I did get to write a little more. I think the 5,002 words I typed up are close to a record and I am 49.6% done (with the competition, not the book).

Journal Entry: NaNoWriMo 2021 Day 8: A Thought

I am over 50% done (55.4%, to be precise) and now have 10 badges. It dawned on me that the only way I could have written this fast was if I was motivated by a) the gamification of NaNoWriMo and b) the fact that the story was thoroughly outlined. Very thoroughly. I spent a long while filling in details of that outline, so much so that all I really needed to do was expand on those details with a few thousand words. If I could do this for every novel, it might not take me four months to spit out 125,000 words. But can I keep up this pace?

Journal Entry: NaNoWriMo 2021 Days 9 through 13: Not Always Easy

The middle part of any project is often one that languishes just a bit. There is an initial excitement to get going and a frantic rush to the finish line, but in the middle comes a doldrum. Even NaNoWriMo seems to acknowledge this as I received an email on the 12th day that said “We know the Week Two slump is all too real. The shiny newness of your novel can feel like it’s fading. Don’t be discouraged!”

It’s like they know me.

I still managed to write each day, but occasionally the words did not flow as they did at first (see Day 11). This might be the subject matter (more romance than adventure in the middle) or it might have been all the pressures from work that seemed to pile up daily (not to mention several hours-long Zoom meetings). Whatever the case, I did finish the week closer to the goal than I started, and that’s what matters.

Journal Entry: NaNoWriMo 2021 Day 14: I Feel the End

The novel I am working on is broken up into three Acts with a total of 17 chapters. For those who might be wondering why this is important, allow me to point you to the Wikipedia article about Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey. I am now into Act 3, and that means I can feel the end.

Kind of like a journey, if you ask me.

Journal Entry: NaNoWriMo 2021 Day 15: So Close…

Wow. If someone told me I would be able to write nearly 50,000 words (47,200 as of today) in just 15 days, I would have laughed. It would probably be a sad laugh full of regret, but a laugh nonetheless.

Journal Entry: NaNoWriMo 2021 Day 16: Well…Hello, there!

Journal Entry: NaNoWriMo 2021 Days 17 through 18: Not. Quite. Done.

Well, the elation of “winning” NaNoWriMo 2021 has not worn off, but I still have a few more chapters to go. Looks like this will end up being around 57k words, 7k of which I will probably axed to death before adding another 5k just to be coy. Yes, it’s a short novel, but so was The Alchemist (which was 38,871 words, in case you were wondering).

Apparently, I have other work to do (like, you know, work).

Journal Entry: NaNoWriMo 2021 Day 19: A Novel I Have Written

It may not be the best novel in the world–certainly not anything I would let the world read at this point–but that’s a first draft for you. As of today, The Beans of Anafi is complete. It stands at roughly 54,506 words, which means it fits into the category of novel just as much as any other novel out there. Being used to scifi and fantasy, it is only a fraction of the length of those genres, but this is literary fiction.

Just because I was curious (and love stats), I took a look at some famous novels that were below the length of this one. (Not that my novel will be famous, but again…stats!)

• The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling: 54,178
• The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli: 52,677
• Peter Pan by J. M. Barrie: 50,844
• A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle: 47,015
• The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum: 42,636
• The Alchemist, novel by Paulo Coelho: 38,871
• The Time Machine by H. G. Wells: 35,530
• Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll: 29,610
• The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson: 28,668
• Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka: 25,189

Now to clean up the prose (first pass edit) before letting it sit for a while.

Journal Entry: NaNoWriMo 2021 Days 20 through 24: A First Pass

My process for writing a novel includes many drafts, and the first pass can be the most painful. You wonder how you could have missed a word here or there and then the what-were-you-thinking thoughts pop up. But that’s okay. The first draft is never intended to be a readable document.

I’ve spent the last few days on this first pass, not only because it is part of my process, but because the NaNoWriMo site keeps teasing me with a badge I haven’t earned yet (update progress every day). I am a completionist (to use their terms), and I must have that badge.

Journal Entry: NaNoWriMo 2021 Day 25: Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is a day to give thanks, and I can do so with sincerity. I thank the NaNoWriMo people for putting together a program that helped me drive toward the finish line. As I had never tried this before, I have been pleased and truly believe gamification is what made it work.

I did manage to “carve out” a few words today, too.

Journal Entry: NaNoWriMo 2021 Days 26 through 29: The Second through Sixth Pass

All subsequent revisions tend to remove words and sometimes whole sections. You can see the word count drop in my table. This is a good thing and helps me learn about all the ways I’ve artificially increased my word count in the past.

Journal Entry: NaNoWriMo 2021 Day 30: Done

NaNoWriMo is only once a year (excluding the “camps” they hold in April and July). There is an app out there called 4thewords which appears to use the same gamification concept. I will try this out soon, as January approaches. I have scheduled myself to complete the third novel in my Transit series. At an expected 125,000 words, I do not believe I can finish in a month, but I now have some tools and ideas to speed up my turtle-ish pace.

The Beans of Anafi now stands at 54,422 words, and after six passes, it is ready to be sent to some beta readers for comments.

If anyone would to read it, you may contact me at author@bxwretlind.com. I will be happy to oblige.

Day	Word Count	Running Mean Daily Word Count	Total Word Count	% Complete
1	4275	4275	4275	8.5%
2	2391	3333	6666	13.3%
3	4032	3566	10698	21.4%
4	1625	3081	12323	24.6%
5	3099	3084	15422	30.1%
6	4373	3299	19795	39.6%
7	5002	3542	24797	49.6%
8	2887	3461	27684	55.4%
9	2877	3396	30561	61.1%
10	2460	3302	33021	66.0%
11	882	3082	33903	67.8%
12	2851	3063	36754	73.5%
13	4353	3162	41107	82.2%
14	2764	3134	43871	87.7%
15	3329	3147	47200	94.4%
16	5282	3280	52482	105.0%
17	845	3137	53327	106.7%
18	1052	3021	54379	108.8%
19	127	—	54506	109.0%
20	164	—	54670	109.3%
21	95	—	54765	109.5%
22	29	—	54794	109.6%
23	3	—	54797	109.6%
24	60	—	54857	109.7%
25	-270	—	54587	109.2%
26	-102	—	54485	109.0%
27	-303	—	54182	108.4%
28	-35	—	54147	108.3%
29	276	—	54423	108.8%
30	-1	—	54422	108.8%

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