After writing for the past three days for NaNoWriMo, things are going amazingly smoothly. Although I still have a long way to go as I plan on turning this into an actual full-length novel, I can say I’m quite inspired.

The progress of the book is in the sidebar of this website. It’s untitled at the moment, and I try to remember to update the stats on a daily basis.

I’m not sure if it has more to do with my personal drive lately or that NaNoWriMo gamifies writing with the goals, badges, and word counts. Either way, it has done a fairly good job engaging me.

The way some people talked about it on Twitter, I thought NaNoWriMo would be far more difficult.

Going Beyond the Daily Word Count

According to NaNoWriMo, I need to write at least 1,667 words per day to reach the 50,000 mark by the end of November. In reality, though, I write quite a bit more than that in any given month.

However, most of those words were for tutorials, freelance writing articles, video scripts, and other texts. This is actually the first time I’ve put so much effort into a creative piece.

So, it’s not so much the word count that I am focusing on in this process. It’s more of the achievement of writing a massive chunk of my next published book.

Well, after I publish my eBook, that is, which I am still working on at the moment.

More Difficult to Balance Everything Out at the Moment

I’ve decided to stop stressing over all of the things I am trying to handle on any given day. There’s simply not enough time in the day to do what I want to get done. So, I’ve started prioritizing my workload.

The hardest thing now is how much time I’ve been dedicating to NaNoWriMo and A Freelancer’s Tale (yes, I’ve finally named my first book).

Because a large portion of my day is dedicated to creative writing, I haven’t been able to blog much nor make the YouTube videos I had planned. Though, I’m still trying to juggle everything.

Still, both of these books I am working on only serve to accomplish life-long goals…to be published. And although I feel like I’m cheating a bit by self-publishing, I am looking forward to having my own books behind me on the shelf.

Even if I’m the only one who actually buys the copies, I’ll be a happy camper. Mostly because they’ll be a testament to me actually finishing something I started.

I’ll Be Done Before Thanksgiving Vacation?

According to NaNoWriMo, I’ll hit the 50k word mark by November 22nd. I doubt I’ll simply stop there, though. At the rate I’m going, I might actually be done writing this one before year’s end.

As I am probably going to stream all weekend for Extra Life this year, it’ll put me back a bit in terms of the word-count goal. Not to mention I plan on being in Utah for about five days.

However, I nearly wrote double what I needed yesterday and will probably do so again today. I guess we’ll just have to see how much I can get done before heading home for the holiday.

I Love Number Crunching!

I’m a bit of a dork. I love reports and numbers when it pertains to a variety of things in my life. I have spreadsheets for just about everything, and NaNoWriMo has a cool reporting system.

It’s actually what gamifies the experience for me. I love watching my progress with charts and graphs. Not to mention I want to see how large I can get the numbers to appear on my profile.

The platform isn’t as extravagant as what I do on my own freelancing spreadsheet. Nonetheless, it keeps me focused and working towards my writing goals, and that’s all that really matters.

Looking Forward to Publishing This One

I wasn’t sure what my first self-published piece of fiction was going to be. After writing the last 20 pages of this new novel, this is definitely going on KDP. I’m not sure how well it’ll perform, though.

It is a bit of an odd book. I’ve never written in this kind of style before, but it’s definitely something that I enjoy doing. I don’t want to give too much away…you understand.

Anyway, I’m kind of glad I finally decided to check out NaNoWriMo. It gave me that extra umph to put in more effort to produce fiction. I’m really looking forward to cranking out more books in 2022.