Chace Randolph

Blog Post 71 Written and Uploaded: 11-10-2023

As I am sure some of you will know, November is kind of a big deal for writers. It is National write a novel month. The idea is, to write an entire 50,000 word book, in the month of November. It is often abbreviated as “NaNoWriMo” which for some reason is always a hard acronym for me to remember.

Anyway, I usually participate, since for the past five or so consecutive years I have had a book to give to one of my beta readers for Christmas. Well this year is going to be a little different, and while I am still working on a project, it wont fit stickily into the NaNoWriMo guidelines. They’re more of guidelines than actual rules anyway. I started with a book already in the works. It was somewhere between 25,000 and 30,000 words at the beginning of the month anyway. (As of this post it is now up to 37,000 words.) I am aiming for a final word count of 60,000. But I am also aiming to be finished before November is over. As I will be seeing this beta reader/ family member for thanksgiving this year, not Christmas. So I need to finish the remaining 23000 words before Thanksgiving. This works out to 2100 words every day, from now until then.

And with how crazy busy life has been for me the past few weeks, this feels like a tall order. We’ll see what happens. I’m going to give it the good old, try. I know tomorrow I probably wont get anything done, because I have a wedding to attend. But Saturday next weekend is also set aside for nothing but writing, and provided I can stay on topic I know I can get 5-8000 words done in a day. So perhaps I can use that weekend to get it done and wrap it up.

Nor does it have to be exactly 60,000 words. That’s just kind of an arbitrary average word count length for what I have been writing the past few years, so perhaps I will get it wrapped up in 55,000 or 57,000. At least speaking for myself, 50,000 just feels a little too short. We’ll see what happens, but that is atleast what my keyboard has to look forward too in the next couple of weeks.

P.S. now that its getting colder, my cat is in much more need of snuggles, so as I am writing this, and I expect as I continue writing for the rest of the month, I will probably have this hairy thing in my lap, making biscuits on my legs for the duration as well.