I can’t believe November is over in 12 hours. It’s been a long month. I think I’ll have some real lessons to take away once I’ve verified my final word count tonight, but I’ll discuss those in a later post.

After five days of travel for Thanksgiving weekend, my word count sits at 46,628. I managed to write 1,000 words or so between eating so much food, drinking a bit, and spending time with family… oh and a hell of a lot of driving; two Thanksgivings some 350 miles apart. I’m glad to be out of my car.

I’ll get home this afternoon, appease my dog with a nice walk and maybe some play time, and then sit down to write without stopping for five hours. I don’t think (read: hope) it will take me that long to break 50,000, but I don’t want to take any chances. I’m too close not to finish, damn it!

The good news is that my time away from my story and through many hours of driving (I did all of the driving), allowed me to ponder and (I think) solve a narrative dilemma I had run into. My story sits on the brink of a mas convergence of several individual plot lines, which will set up the remaining 2/3 of the story for my protagonists. I knew that these plots and characters had to meet (literally) in order for the story to progress — and to drum up some suspense — but the details of this convergence were giving me fits. Driving gave me the mental space to mull it over and hash out how this vital sequence will play out. I have also generated some real ideas for a follow-up novel, so “Jaed and Aston Part Two” just may be in the works for NaNo 2016. But more on that next year.

The point is, I can’t wait to get home and speed-type 3,500 (at least) words. And I don’t want to stop in December. Two or three days of writing for a solid 5-8k words per week is totally feasible after NaNo. I’ll get to a nice stopping point in my writing before the end of the year and then begin going back and making revisions, which I’m already brainstorming.

This is the most productive I have ever been as a writer, and it feels amazing. Now, I just need to keep going. Just a few more hours of work before I’m home with my laptop (and the dog too, I guess)…

Steve D