Recalibrating time line

I am behind on my time line for my book in progress (see Steve Teller called me a bastard). When I planned my writing schedule in the summer, I had planned on making November be my big push month. November is the month in which NaNoWriMo takes place - National Novel Writing Month. NaNoWriMo is a creative writing project in which participants aim to write a 50,000 word novel in one month. I've never participated in a NaNoWriMo but I've thought about it. In fact, I thought I could use my current novel as an experiment to see how I'd fare in a NaNoWriMo.

Well, if this past November is any indication, I would not fare very well. My original plan was to complete my book plan by end of September, let it incubate in October, then blast out the text in November - my target was 60,000 words.

I actually completed my book plan in August, so I thought, why wait until November? The target of 60,000 words in a month sounded very ambitious and so I decided to start writing in September and plan to finish my first draft in November. I thought I would use September and October as warm ups and do my most writing in November.

Ha! November actually turned out to be my least productive writing month. Part of the reason was that I lost my job at the end of October and used a lot of my emotional energy in November setting up the transition into my new lifestyle, instead of writing.

My current word count is over 21,000 so I am just over one third towards my target. I've completed my first draft on Chapter 1, have written most of Chapter 2, and have started writing scenes for Chapters 3 and 4. I'm recalibrating my time line. My new target is to complete to end of Chapter 4 by the end of this month. The end of this year! At that point I will have completed half of my book, according to my book plan (I am planning to write eight chapters in total).