I’m doing NaNoWriMo again this year and working on drafting my “dragon novel” that has been stalled in the brainstorming stage for a long time. I managed to write 9k words at Murderbooze last weekend, and that represents the majority of my progress so far. It’s day 11 now and my current word count is 13,291. I rarely hit even 1k words in a day.

I’m reminding myself that this is how it always goes – most days I write at a snails pace, and then I get momentum going and suddenly the words pour out of me. Last year I won NaNo by writing 30k words over Thanksgiving weekend. It was exhausting, I hope I never have to do that again, but also based on what college and grad school were like … I think that’s maybe just how my brain works? Some combination of immersion and deadline makes things click and then boom I’ve written a research paper/novel/genetic algorithm in a weekend.

On the bright side, I’m mostly not hating what I write. A lot of the scenes lack conflict, but that’s what the second draft is for.