Three days in to NaNoWriMo 2019 and I have 10,443 words in the bag, which is almost my first four chapters done.  It’s been about 2 hours a day to hit that pace, which I’m extremely happy with. If I could find time to keep that pace and write three or more hours a day, I’d be very satisfied. Alas, so far I have not been able to achieve that.

I’m trying not to self-edit too much in this first-draft run through so that I can focus on getting the complete story to paper (or screen, as the case may be). I can clean it up after the first draft is done, and since that will be unavoidable, no sense trying to forestall it by editing as I go. Still, sometimes I can’t help myself.

If I can sustain this writing pace, then I can reasonably expect to finish the novel by the end of the year. It’s plotted at about fifty chapters, so I’m expecting somewhere between 125,000 and 150,000 words when finished. Any more than that, and I’ll have to seriously take the scissors to parts of it. Yes, A Game of Thrones is 298,000 words, but I’m not going to pretend I’m Martin on the first go-round. Not from a writing standpoint and not from a marketing standpoint.

Nevertheless, I’m finding relatively few moments when I’m stymied about what to write next, which is new for me. Hopefully it keeps up!

If you’d like to read the first chapter, click here. If you’d like to be a reader and journey along with me as I write, please be in touch!