Well, mostly. I'm writing this post on Day 17 of the First Draft. As I mentioned last time, I can't help but compare this month's progress to last year's NaNo progress. Back then, I hit 50,000 words then after just three weeks. This time around, I've had six full zero-count days and at least two more days that were close enough to zero to be zero. By Day 16 I was behind nearly 15,000 words for the month.

But . . . behind what? Some arbitrary and meaningless schedule? Sure, it was a nice plan, but you can't plan creativity, right?

Ah baloney! Of course you can and that's what I did on Day 17 (which, at the time of this writing, isn't over). I had gotten stuck at a real sticky point and decided to solve it by ignoring it. Oh, I'll come back to it later, but the very act of typing "come back to this later" in the manuscript and moving on gave me a psychological boost. My gross word count today (which, at the time of this writing, still isn't over) was 6,723. My net word count was more like 5500 because I deleted a bunch of stuff too.

So here's hoping things keep heading this direction. I doubt I'll finish the first draft by Halloween, but that will just give me something to do during NaNo: namely cheat like I did last year and start the month with a manuscript in progress.

But who's counting?

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