Current Day: 15
Current Page: 85
Target Page: 85-7
Location in Story: first gem retrieved. Second gem in the works. How? By persuading the drunken younger brother of a super vain princess to steal an emerald from his sister. I'm a little disappointed that Eva's established pickpocketing skills aren't going to come into play here, because Judas is the one who will actually do the stealing (yes, his name is Judas... don't judge me), but I might have her tag along and actually do the stealing. Drunk Judas is talking Judas, and talking Judas might wake sleeping sister who likes beauty sleep.
CAUTION: SLIGHT SWEARING AT THE END OF THIS POST. (I don't know if there are any actual readers who want a caution on that sort of thing, but it's worth it)
Now that we're halfway through November, the end is in sight. There are a finite number of days between now and the end of the month, which is both a good thing and a bad thing. It's a good thing because I'm over halfway to making a habit of writing more (what is it, three weeks to create a new habit?), but it's also less of a buffer zone - if my word count suddenly tanks, I have less time to make it up. That being said, I took the opportunity to look back over some of my old stats. Though my word count is nowhere near as good as it could be, and it's nowhere near where it was in 2011, it's definitely better than it was in 2013. Currently, my word count is approximately 25,200 words (or it will be by the end of page 85, since I'm not done with page 85 yet). The Wild Card Overachiever target would be 30k-31.5k words, but the NaNo Official Word Count is 25k; as long as I stay above that number, all will be okay. I hope.
The danger, of course, is that I reach the end but not the word count of 50k. If that happens, I'm going to count that as a win. I don't know if my word count is actually 300 words per page; though many of my pages have over 300 words on them, about 1/4 of them have less than a full page written (my chapters are about 4 pages each). My handwriting has gotten smaller than when I did the test page, but I'm also writing a lot of dialogue that might get edited out later, but there might be more than 300 words per page.
In the end, it's not about how much I write, but whether I write. I think that's true for a lot of people. There are a lot of quotes on Pinterest about WRITE BETTER, NOT MORE, and also DON'T STOP WRITING, but I would like to say to those people: GET IN THE HABIT OF WRITING AND MAKE IT SOUND PRETTY LATER.
I'm going to use a makeup metaphor. (I never thought I would say those words, but here we go).
Makeup is an attempt to make people look prettier. Sometimes it enhances a pretty feature. Sometimes it just makes that one zit less prominent. There is one thing that every makeup wearer has in common, though: THEY ALL HAVE A FACE (unless you are a faceless makeup wearer, in which case I apologize). Some have blue eyes and some have brown eyes and some people are Southeast Asian and some people are from Iceland and some people are some interesting mix of their Cherokee mother's cheekbones and their Turkish father's eyes. Not every face is the same, but everyone has a face on which to put makeup (again, my apologies to the faceless makeup gurus).
Similarly, there is one thing that every first draft has in common: words. Like makeup on a face, you can't pretty up the pretty stuff if there's no pretty stuff to begin with; you can't take out the shitty stuff if there's no shit in the first place. Blank pages are the things that go in the back of books whose page numbers aren't in a multiple of 8 or 12. Blank pages only go within the the novel if there is an artistic choice or a printing error.
I don't know where I'm going with this, so I'm just going to write about a drunk prince and then go to bed.
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