NaNoWriMo Progress – Weeks Three and Four

Week Three – Dated 11/19/08

I learned that it is near impossible to write while at work.  Granted, it’s something I knew already but it was confirmed yesterday.  We have some slow periods but the pace always seems to pick up in November.  For the most part I have tried to write each day even if I do not meet my daily word count goal. 

Week Four – Dated 11/30/08

Today was really my most painful day.  I think all month long I’ve taken a total of 3 days off from writing but I have not met my daily word count goal every day.  And it bit me in the behind.  At the beginning of today my total word count was 41,745. 

One of the ways to prep for NaNoWriMo is to have a back-up of your novel.  I think it needs to be amended to have a recent back-up of your novel available.  I kept saving my novel to my USB drive throughout the day when I received an error message from Word that it could no longer find the file.  With only 4,000 words left to write I tried to keep it together while I was panicking.  My back-up was from 10 days prior and my word count was almost 30K. 

Ten years of Help Desk work paid off!  I was able to find a temporary file from fifteen minutes earlier that was only missing a few hundred words.  To be honest, I felt a little bit on tilt but I kept on writing.  With an hour and five minutes left before midnight I crossed the finish line with over 50,000 words and all my plot lines tied up.