November 2nd – 982,324

Since I'd finished the previous story, I picked up another manuscript today, one I’d made a 5k start on about a month ago and then put aside to finish something else. I kind of expected it to take a while to get going but I closed the file down and did the calculation to find I’d more than doubled the manuscript’s length – 5,675 words in just about two and a half hours.

That’s taken me past 580k and I’ve hit nearly 16.5k words in the last three days and I’m speeding up not slowing down. This word rate is going to put me over the finishing line some time on Wednesday, if not Tuesday, which is awesome from my point of view.

I’ve already picked out my NANO project and I’m going to literally use that as a stretch down project, and consciously control my writing to keep it below the rate I’ve been hitting. The one thing I’m not going to do is go cold turkey on writing. I’ll ease down to 3k, and then around 2k a day to complete the NANO project, spend early December finishing off this manuscript (which will probably have about 10-15k to go at that point, maybe a little more), and then start parcelling everything up and setting up a self-editing schedule.

Anyway, that’s the plan, and including the NANO project I’ll have 17 completed first drafts to attack for editing purposes. Two of them have major plot holes, and two have stories that bent so far away from the original idea as I wrote them that I’m not sure they’ll be salvageable. The others will be okay – provided I spend 2014 editing and not get tempted into trying to better this year’s score. Which might happen – after all I’ve got another 14 started manuscripts from this year, and about a dozen from before then that are worth pursuing – that’s not counting any new ideas or continuations that come out during the whole process. I’m not known as the sequel king for nothing. LOL