Here it is on the evening of November 20th, two-thirds of the way through National Novel Writing Month. So how's it going?

As of this writing, I'm at 51,438 words and about 75% through my novel's outline. At the rate I'm going, I am likely to finish before I hit my first 75,000-word stretch goal. I passed the NaNoWriMo goal of 50,000 words today. 24,562 left to go.

I'm not going to say it's easy, but I've done quite a few of these NaNoWriMos now (7 wins out of 9 tries), clocking over 400,000 words just for NaNoWriMo. In the last two years of serious writing, I've clocked close to 250,000 words of published material.

A lot of people have dropped out for a lot of reasons. Some never started. Others quit after hitting that first hurdle. Others still plod along, lost in the swampy middle of a soggy sh!tty first draft. I think the average number of participants who complete is around 10-15%. That's an incredibly low rate of return. Wanting to write a novel and writing a novel are two different things.

Writing is work.

Writing is hard.

Like a muscle or talent, it needs exercise to get better.

For me, word count at this point doesn't matter. Better words matter. Structure matters. I have structural issues with this rough draft, but as a whole it's a better rough draft than I've ever done before. It might take me another million words really get better. So I'll keep writing. If you're doing NaNoWriMo, you should to. Stop reading this and go write.