NaNoWriMo 2021 Days 26 – 30

With me falling quite a way behind, I finally managed to crack on with some NaNo, hopefully in time to rescue the situation.

On Friday, Day 26, I had just under 18,000 words to go, which gave me 5 days at 3,600 words per day. I wrote 3,667 words (35,842).

35,842/50,000 words. 72% done!

I also had ghostwriting to do and the plan was to work at the weekend. Saturday was very busy, though, and I didn’t get around to any writing work.

We went to visit the MiL and left the dog with her while we did the shopping. Then the poet bagged up 2 lots of coal, and we went back home. He had a gig that night, and I had to run him there, come back, get ready, go back, and bring us both home.

Following a late night we had a late start on Sunday, but I did write for much of the day as well as bake a pudding for tea. I didn’t finish all of the ghostwriting. At about 11:30pm I sent what I had with the promise of the rest to follow ASAP.

Day 29

I decided on a lazy start for Monday with only NaNo writing work planned. I also had publicity stuff to do for the new project management book, and I had to update my spreadsheets – reading and writing.

I have another book due out next Monday, another Wordsworth Short, and I hadn’t even started to prepare it for publication yet, so that was a job I was going to do in between bursts of NaNo.

In the end, I prepared and published three more Wordsworth Shorts for December too.

I spent some time on my NaNo project too, but at the end of it all, when I went to check the word-count, it had gone DOWN instead of UP. I was too tired to look into that by the end of Monday, so I shelved it until the next day.

Day 30

Last day… and the first thing I did was look at why my word-count had dived in Scrivener. There were two reasons. Firstly, I hadn’t ticked the ‘include in compile box’ (or I’d unticked it). And secondly, I’d moved some of the material to a different part of the binder that fell *outside* the ‘include in compile’.

I fixed both of those, and that brought my running total to 44,365 words. Phew! I wasn’t as far behind as I thought I was. I still had more than 5,000 words to write but, hey, I’ve written 19,000 words in one day before, so 5,000 was a doddle…

I tidied up my office a bit (now there’s Blu Tack stuck to the wall that I can’t get off), made a cup of tea, had a snack, and settled down to write those 5,635 words.

Reader, I managed to wrench out… 5,652 words, bringing me to 50,017 words!

50,017/50,000 words. 100% done!

I did it!