How I’m Doing NaNoWriMo This Year: Cheating

I’ve done NaNoWriMo (that’s National Novel Writing Month) several times. I’ve completed two bad novels, got partway through another, and spent one NaNoWriMo revising my memoir. Last year I started NaNoWriMo, then decided to do NaNoPlanMo instead, planning my novel, the same novel I’m still working on now, a year later.

Little by little I’ve been adding to it, and I’m finally in the home stretch. I have about 80,000 words, and just two or three chapters left write. But it’s been slow-going. I write between 200 and 300 words, five or six days a week. Once in a blue moon, I’ll write between 500 and 1,000 words. Better than nothing, but not a lot. So this year I thought I’d do NaNoWriMo, not to write a whole new novel, but to up my word count toward 1,667.

The thing is I don’t want to write that many words a day for my novel. Number one, I write a lot for work, and after doing a blog post, I’m kinda burnt out. Two or three hundred words is doable, but not much more.

Number two, I don’t want to write shit. In the past, I’ve written a lot of shit just to get in my word count. Not that every word in my current novel is gold, but I don’t want to be typing and not knowing where the story is going. I want to stop when I feel like I’m pooping out. I want to be able to research and revise.

So this is how I’m cheating: I’m counting everything I write in the 1,667 word count. Not emails or anything like that, but blog posts and shorter pieces (though I don’t think I’ll start any new stories or essays until the novel is done). The post I wrote for work earlier today counts (566 words) and this post right here counts (over 300 words).

And the total? About 1,200 words, which means I’m still short.

On the upside, I blogged for the first time in a while, and I added 374 words to my novel, which is slightly more than I usually do. Hopefully I can make up the difference on another day.

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