I may not get there. I’ve already juked the stats but it doesn’t look as if that will help.

Yesterday was day 15 of the 2015 National Novel Writing Month and I should be at 25,000 words. Instead, on day 16 I’m at 19,190 words. If I’d stuck with my plan of writing on the days off during October and swapping them out with days in November, I’d be in better shape.

Instead I spent a lot of time doing research and doing some basic world building.  That was useful, but didn’t produce many pages of text. (More on that later.)

After a good start, I hit last week. I was busy and I didn’t get much chance to sit down and write. Over the weekend I got a lot done and then sat down and recounted words. I’m putting down about 195 words per page on average and decided to bump my official word count per page. That helped a little, but not that much.

(Note: With those accounting skills I am available to help governments of all kinds with revenue and harvest predictions and five year plans.)

The coming weeks will be just as busy as last week.

I’ve finally got a plot and an ending and am forcing myself to slow down and overwrite. One of the problems with writing by hand is you feel as if you’ve written more than you have and you’re convinced the pages you’ve just written are wordy and boring. Then, when you enter them into a word processor, you realize they are only one page of typed text and that you’re actually rushing.

I’ll keep working on the book. I have a couple weekends yet to go, including one three day weekend, and I could manage my time after school and before my evening class better. I could also, hypothetically, work on bits of it during class. Hypothetically, of course.

The last ditch plan will involve incorporating the research I’ve done. It’s not very much, though, and I’ll have to get a lot closer to 50,000 for those notes to help. I’ve already dropped a couple days of writing anyway, so I won’t feel too bad about adding them to the total.

I will also need to find a place to hide and write when I’m at work.