NaNoWriMo 2007: Day 26

Five days remain to complete this year's novel-writing challenge. While other novelists kept on rolling, my word count stalled out around 27,000 Thanksgiving Eve and didn't start back up until Saturday evening, when we returned from Yosemite. I was able to crank out 2,000 words before conking out that night.

Yesterday was The Day. If I didn't make a big push and produce an insane number of words before the sun went down, I figured I was finished.

Before I sat down to write, I kept thinking, "You've had more than two weeks to catch up and you are still thousands of words behind. If you can't find the discipline to focus and write, then maybe you don't have it."

Then I sat down, limbered up my fingers, and said, "Let's do this thing!" In my head, I sounded tough like The Rock. In reality, I sounded more like Linguini from Ratatouille.

With the help of a healthy dose of sunlight, encouragement from M, a pot of coffee, a bag of Skittles, and a new writing hat (it looks silly, but works), I somehow managed to knock out 13,000 words.

While it's nice to see I have it in me to successfully pull off a last ditch effort, it's disappointing that I let the situation reach the point where a last ditch effort was necessary.

With less than 8,000 words to go, I'm going to try to ride yesterday's momentum and cross the finish line by tomorrow night.