That many words in thirty days

It’s November, and that means it’s the National Novel Writing Month – writers set themselves a challenge of writing 50,000 words in the month. I have accepted the challenge every year since 2013, and every year I have managed, sometimes by the skin of my fingertips to have met it. In fact I did an extra challenge one year in April, and completed that too.

Somehow things have gone a little awry this year, in many ways. The project I started last November and wrote the first 50,000 words of – well in fact 62,015 words to be exact, was to have been finished, edited and published by late spring, then early summer, then late summer… and now I’m still struggling with the edit and not even sure if it will be completed by Christmas.

So what has gone wrong with my writing this year… to be honest, I really don’t know? Writer’s block? I don’t think so, not in the true sense, writer’s go slow, writer’s dribble, writer’s squeezing the toothpaste tube of story… Everything seems to have slowed down in my writing, as you may have noticed if you regularly read this blog!

Should I have accepted the 2019 National Novel Writing Month challenge? Probably not, but I have, and oh dear, my progress is painful, less written in eight days than I usually write in one. I think it may be a hopeless task, but i will stick to it, squeezing it in among everything else i am doing and writing and editing.

So I won’t be posting my usual breezy reports of my progress, but I will keep slogging silently along. This is what I have to live up to:

• 2013 – Radwinter – 73,026 
• 2014 April – Cooking the books  – 50,125
• 2014 July – Magick and the photo box – 50,071
• 2014 – Raddy and Syl – 50,092
• 2015 – Earthquake – 53,030
• 2016 – And the River – 51,282
• 2017 – Milla – 50,470
• 2018 – Winterdyke – 62,015 

Crumbs! That’s 440,111 words!!, no wonder I’m flagging! Winterdyke, last year’s project,  which i am now editing, ended up at over 130,000 so there’s a lot of cutting and slashing going on! Strange that I’m trying to end up with less for that one, and more for the new challenge, tentatively called Who Do You Think I Am?