I've started mine. I'm cheating just a little bit. I had nearly 3,000 words of an abortive project I started a while back. Now I've gone back to that and think I've figured out where I want to go with it. I'm retooling that fragment into the first chapter. I've just worked up a little character bible and outline to guide the project.

How are you people doing with this? Are you on pace? You've got to be hitting a little more than 1,600 words a day, every day, in order to pull off your 50k for the month.

GET WRITING

I'm about four thousand words behind, but I couldn't get going right away at the beginning of the month. I plan to get caught up over the weekend. I guess ideally I should be trying to write about 1,600 words each day. But with my schedule varying from day to day I'm going to shoot for an overall average instead.

My head just had a tiny explosion.

Halfway there! Since I probably won't have much chance to write over Thanksgiving I've got to pull out ahead this week.

Since many of you don't check Facebook (nor could you find the notices if you did, they post so unobtrusively,) I am at 30K words.

Awesome, James.

Nice work, folks! I'm very impressed that you're hauling along. Keep it up!

Great work, James!

42.5K. If I don't run out of story, I'll finish.

Nice work, James. Very nice work.

DL, JR, how are you guys doing?

I broke 40,000 yesterday. Currently working on Chapter 13, in which, ironically, one of the main characters has an accident.

Hopefully by Christmas I'll have it revised well enough to feel like actually letting someone see it.

I am so impressed that y'all have done this.

Yay!

As of today I am a winner!

OKAY, I SUCK

Awesome, James and Daphne. I'll participate one of these years. I've written lots of comic scripts, but I've never written a novel. I should try.

Great job, guys.

Ladies and gentlebeings, may I introduce James C. Taylor, novelist.

Great job.

My completely unsolicited advice: All that research that caused you to hit a brick wall on THE GLOBAL WARNING? You ought not have worried about it. For NaNoWriMo, better to slam through that first draft and worry about all the fine details when you sit down for the second. Getting hung up on that sort of thing is a surefire way to grind yourself to a halt each and every time, as you now know.

Think about it, did you really need to know the exact procedures for a State of the Union address in order for your book to move forward? Was it so big an issue that you couldn't fudge it and return to it later, refining your completed first draft and making it more accurate? Unless the entire plot hinges on the exact specifications of a State of the Union address or what NORAD stands for, the answer is no.

Forget all that nonsense! Just write. Write until your story is done, stick it in a drawer for a few weeks, then go back to it and give it a work over. Your first draft is always likely to be riddled with holes, errors, inaccuracies, and inconsistencies.

And that's fine. It's part of the process. The important thing is getting it done.

That said, you managed 27k, which is a damn fine start, so good on you for that. Shows that you were more than mere talk. You got in there and got some writing done. Nice work.

AWESOME!

Congrats, James. That's a helluvanaccomplishment. Big, big thing to stick with for a month. Can't say I would have pulled it off. (I've been working on a novel this month, but not for NaNoWriMo. It's my current WIP, and I did not do 50k words in November.)