The Words: 3545 written today. I am 1608 words away from reaching 50,000 words. It’s weird to think that last year, when I got this close to the finish line, I wrote like my life depended on it to get the last 2500 words by midnight, with 45 minutes to go. I have less than 2000 left, and had an hour before midnight when I got to that point, but I just don’t care as much. Maybe the difference is that last year, doing this well was brand new. Or maybe it’s because I was much more into my story last year than I have been this year (or any other year I’ve done NaNo). Either way, this year, it doesn’t bother me to go another day, rather than pushing it (plus, I’ll still hit 50k two days sooner than I did last year).

The Story: Lex and Leahna have now started on a search through a dangerous area. Lex is still hiding something from Leahna–something that makes the search less dangerous. During the several-month-long search, I got a chance to switch the focus to Leahna for a bit. I followed her home, talked about how hectic her life has become (a fact that she is hiding from Lex, so he won’t feel bad), and let her get her mail for the first time in a week. That’s when she discovered some terrible news about her friend, which then gave me a chance to talk about Missy a bit. (Missy is the main character from the novel I started last year during NaNo, finished a few months later, and am now revising.) That was the second place where this story connected with the other one. This time, though, instead of trying to remember how it happened, so I could show the scene from Leahna’s perspective, I just skipped the whole thing and figured that I could sort it out later.

Total word count: 48392

The Words: 5045 written today. Before I went to bed last night, I had already written 4 words shy of the minimum daily word count for today (so 1663). Since it’s Saturday, I had expected to do some more writing this afternoon, but I never got to it. Then when I started writing in the evening, I didn’t think I’d get very far. I mentioned on my Skype group of local NaNo’s that, though today the people who run the event challenged everyone to double their daily average, I was sitting at half of my average 5000, and wasn’t sure I was going to get much further. Someone else immediately suggested we do some word wars, so we did 3 over the course of the next hour and fifteen minutes.

The Story: The story is really moving along now. My biggest concern is that Leahna is barely in it. I knew that might be an issue, but I’m not sure how to solve it, or if I even can. She may just have to be less of a main character than I had originally planned. Today, Lex learned a little more about how the world works, had his future plans turned upside-down, and found a huge piece to the puzzle of his dad’s death. It didn’t answer any questions–in fact, it raised a lot–but the discovery itself was huge. HUGE.

Total word count: 37666