Day Three: Oh dear...

My quest to get to 12,500 words yesterday ended in failure, with my only getting to 10,058 words, an increase of 3,575 words. I was doing quite well, getting through a lot of words quite quickly. But I'm also trying to keep up to date on my TV programmes during the month, and yesterday realised that I had quite a bit that I needed to watch if I didn't want to fall behind, and so I got up to date with them. By the time I came to write again I got distracted by something, and then it became too late to go for the last 2,500 words.

But all is not doom and gloom - I've done double what I needed to do if I was writing at official NaNoWriMo pace with a target of 50,000 words. And there is one, last, crazy hope for me to catch up with my own schedule today...

One of my NaNoWriMo friends (Andrew - not sure what his NaNoWriMo user name is) pointed out this thread to me on the NaNoWriMo website:

http://www.nanowrimo.org/node/3004454

If you're unable to access that - there have been some access problems with the site recently due to heavy traffic - it's about the ultimate NaNoWriMo challenge, namely, to try and write 10,000 words in just 5 hours. I've decided to give that a go - if I'm able to pull it off and get to 20,000 words today I'll be back on target. My time will start at 2.45pm GMT...

In the meantime, I've got some time to (finally) tell you something about my novel. It's called "They Are Coming..." and starts with some people starting at University. Parts of the novel are written in varying 3rd person viewpoints, and parts are written in the 1st person viewpoint of the main character. The reason why I'm doing this is because the main character will slowly be going insane. In the book he'll be talking about a girl he knows from back home, but his friends start to think that she doesn't actually exist. By writing the novel using these viewpoints the reader also won't know whether or not she actually exists (although that does get revealed at the end).

It's coming along quite well so far. I've had to deviate slightly from my initial outline, but that's a good thing because I'm adding to it, rather than diverting significantly away from it, so I still have plenty of things to write about. My main concern is that I've mixed in some elements from my own life with the fiction in the book - when people read it they may find it hard to see the difference between the two. I'd like to assure you all that I'm not really going insane! (Well, maybe just a little - I am trying to write 125,000 words in a month after all!)

I still don't have time to sort out the graph, hopefully I'll get that up in the evening as I intend to stay up tonight to watch the results of the US Presidential Election. My next post here will be at about 8pm GMT where I'll let you know the result of my 10,000 words in 5 hours challenge...