A belated update...

OK, sorry for not updating this for over a week and a half. I've been busy concentrating on my novel, and didn't have time to do a blog entry. Those of you who are reading this via Facebook may have some idea of how I'm getting on by my status updates, but for the benefit of everyone else here's how I've been doing since my last entry:

Day Six: A reasonably good day. I wrote over 4,500 words to get to 20,012 words. I was still behind the pace for getting 125,000 words done this month, but I had reached an important milestone.

Day Seven: The worst day this month where I just couldn't get in the mood to write anything. I was already behind, and with not having done anything today I was 15,000 words behind where I had wanted to be at this point.

Day Eight: A better day than yesterday, but still not good. Just a little over 1,000 words written, taking me to 21,064 words, and now just under 19,000 words behind my target.

Day Nine: The best day of the month so far, with 5,457 words written, taking me to 26,521. The gap between where I am and where I should be had closed, but only slightly, as the gap now stood at about 18,500 words.

Day Ten: Not such a good day, but I still got 3,536 words written, taking me up to 30,057 words, and another milestone reached. But I was further behind my target, the gap was now almost 20,000 words. I then decided to give up on my target of 125,000 words, and decided to aim for a revised target of 80,000 words (more on this later), which would mean that I would now just have to do 2,500 words each day.

Day Eleven: Not a good start on going for my revised target - just 1,326 words done.

Days Twelve and Thirteen: Things are improving now, with 2,875 words done on day twelve, and 3,270 words on day thirteen, bringing me up to 37,528 words, and back on target for 80,000 words.

Days Fourteen, Fifteen, and Sixteen: Steady and consistent progress, meeting my target each day. I now stand on 45,017 words, which is 56.27% of my new target. There was also another NaNoWriMo meetup on the 15th, which was good fun as well. I wasn't the only high achiever there, as there were a couple of people who were a few thousand words ahead of me...

And so there you have it, it looks like my dream of writing 125,000 words in a month is slipping out of my fingers. However, 80,000 words will still be a respectable total, and it would be almost 30,000 words more than what I did last year. If I get to 80,000 words I won't consider myself a failure, as that is still a good achievement.

But is 125,000 words by 30th November impossible? I do have a very slim outside chance of making it. I'm back at work tomorrow, and I'm planning to get some writing done during my lunch breaks. I think I can get up to 1,000 words, maybe a little more, done then. Then I just need to write my socks off when I get home. If I can get 5,000 words done on each of the ten days that I'm at work this month, and then a whopping 7,500 words done on each of the four weekend days that are left, I'll reach 125,000 words. That's going to be very difficult, but it's not impossible.

Am I going to take a shot at it? Well, I'm not going to revise my 80,000 word target upwards just yet, but I think I will have a go at getting 5,000 words done tomorrow, but that's just because if I can get that done I'll reach the official NaNoWriMo winning post of 50,000 words.

And if I can achieve that, then, well, we'll see...

Oh, and before I go today, have a graph (I'll talk more about it tomorrow):