I rolled past the one week mark for National Novel Writing Month on Thursday with some higher-than-usual daily word counts. As of the end of day eight, which was yesterday, I had a total of 17,325 words, all of which were part of Untitled Hat Trick Sequel #1.
There’s a couple ways to look at that word count. It’s an average daily word count of 2,166. Or, when you consider it against the daily minimum word count of 1,667 that you need to hit 50,000 words by the end of the month, it means that I did 10.3 days worth of writing in 8. I’m trilled by this since I usually hover near the minimum word count. The first eight days had two days of record setting counts for me: day four’s 2,874 and day eight’s 3,212.
I’ve made great progress on Untitled Hat Trick Sequel #1 (except, as you can see, for giving the new book a title). The manuscript currently sits at over 37,500 words. I’ve got at least two more scenes to write, which will get this close to 50k, which is a good novel size. I’ve written, what I consider, to be some really great scenes. A couple passages almost brought me to tears, which I like. I think it’s good to be able to move myself with the things I write. It make me hopeful that it can translate to the readers.
Over the coming week, I believe I’ll finish the first draft of Sequel #1. I’ll put that aside and start adding scenes to Sequel #2 and Sequel #3. I’m not sure which I’ll work on, or if I might bounce between them since I’ve got scenes rattling around in my head for both of them. As soon as November is over, however, I’ll be back to Sequel #1 to do edits and prep it for submission.