NaNoWriMo 2019 | Week 4 (Days 22-30)

Hello, friends! At this point in time, I am on my birthday cruise and, most likely, having a grand time. 🙂 But I didn’t want to leave you hanging about NaNoWriMo! For those that saw my Instagram update, I hit 50,000 words on November 27 – a nice pre-birthday present to myself. Here’s how the whole week went down:

Day 22

• Goal: 2,000 words
• Actual: 2,051 words

Ooh, I actually had a lot of fun writing today! It was nice to have an easy writing day after so many days when I felt like I was just writing utter garbage. The scenes I wrote were a bit unexpected, too, as I hadn’t included them in my plot outline but it all just came out in the writing. How fun! I needed this easy, fun writing day because I was getting worried about motivating myself to finish this challenge and worried I was losing momentum. Apparently not! I’m excited to get back to my story tomorrow. 🙂 That’s a great feeling!

Day 23

• Goal: 2,000 words
• Actual: 1,711 words

Oof, today was just a hard day of writing for me. I had a fun scene to write but it was such a struggle to get the words down. Today was also a pretty bleak mental health day for me, one of the first days in a while where I felt the pull of darkness wanting to drag me down. My mental health has been fairly stable and serene for months so it’s hard not to get worried that this one day will morph into multiple days… then weeks… then months. Tomorrow is a new day, though, right? I think I’ll take myself to the gym first thing to get some endorphins flowing and cross my fingers that help lift this cloud of gray fogging up my head.

Day 24

• Goal: 2,000 words
• Actual: 1,675 words

While I didn’t meet my word count goal for today (I’m growing less concerned with hitting that goal since I’m so close to finishing!), I’m happy with the progress I made today. And I wrote these words in the morning, not in the evening like I have been doing on Sundays. This means that when I come home after a day of watching football at my mom’s, I can just R E L A X. Woohoo!

Anyway, the writing itself went well and was much, much easier than yesterday. I think it’s because I went on a beautiful morning walk before sitting down to write so I was feeling a bit more connected to myself, and because I am going to spend today with my mom, my brother, and my older nephew, which ALWAYS puts me in a better mood.

Day 25

• Goal: ?
• Actual: 1,296 words

Since I’m so close to the end of the challenge (3,500 words to go!), I’m not setting daily word count goals anymore. I’m trying to write two pages a day until I reach 50,000 words. Then, my plan is to take a break until Dec. 9th and get back to writing daily until I finish my novel. Here’s hoping I’ll be motivated in December to get it done!

Back to today. I had a really fun time writing these two pages, although I may have screwed myself royally because I wrote the scene as if my two characters had an entirely different reason to be together. While I love the change I made and I think it’s going to add an extra emotional layer to the story (that it needs, to be honest), it does mean I’m setting myself up for way more revisions than I intended.

I had a hard time getting started today because I kept thinking about the next few scenes in my novel. It’s time to start wrapping things up (I’m predicting I have 5-8 scenes left) and I have no idea what the dark moment is going to be. It’s completely up in the air! The dark moment is so crucial and I read so many of them in romance novels that make me roll my eyes. I don’t want that!

To sum it up, today was a good writing day but internally, the day from hell. Ha.

Day 26

• Goal: ?
• Actual: 1,307 words
• Things researched: top of a mountain in georgia

Goodness gracious, I had such a fun time writing today! The change I made yesterday seems to make my characters feel so much more real and alive, and their chemistry seems palpable. Even though this change will cause some massive rewrites, I think it’s so perfect for the story and will allow me to work through some things in my own life through my character. (Which I know for a fact is something many authors do.)

I’m so close to the end, I can’t believe it! This challenge has been so much fun to complete and I’m just praying I can keep the momentum up in December to finish the story.

Day 27

• Goal: ?
• Actual: 2,185 words

I did it! Today, I hit 50,000 words! I am so very proud of myself and pleased with the way my story is turning out. I’m closing in on 80,000 words in the story, which is mind-blowing to me considering where I was at not even a month ago. But now it’s an actual story! Almost complete!

I am going to discuss NaNoWriMo as a whole in another post so let’s focus on today’s writing session. It was a very good writing session – felt easy and fun. Before writing, I knew I needed around 2,000 words to get to 50,000 so I made that my goal. I will say that the last 500 words felt like a slog, haha, but I think that was just because I knew how close I was to that magic 50k number.

And now I’m done! For now, at least. I’m going to spend some time outlining the rest of my story (since I have a better idea of how it’s all going to turn out, although I’m still unsure of the dark moment) and then come the second week of December, it’s back to writing so I can do the thing I’ve been wanting to do for years: finish a novel. Eeks!

Final word count for NaNoWriMo 2019: 50,159 words