As of this morning, I’m just shy of 10,000 words written for Altars and Acolytes, aka Please Just Let Me Finish Writing You: The Erik Gern Story. In any other NaNoWriMo, this would be not-so-great progress, but for this book, it’s been amazing.
The strategy of throwing out my last act and rewriting it from scratch has paid off. The chapters have been substantially easier to write with a strong outline, as I’ve been able to finish about one per day. I still get the luxury of minor course corrections, such as changing the milieu of a scene from Point A to Point B, without worrying if it’s going to slow me down too much.
A downside is that, while I’m getting words down, it’s a bit sloppier than the earlier portion of the draft. I was on a “Revise A, Write B; Revise B, Write C” schedule before, which allowed me to clean up the previous day’s words before putting new ones down (as well as letting me retroactively fix some continuity issues as I go along). I don’t have that luxury now, since my goal is to just finish these chapters, so once they’re down I’ll have to go back and do some cleanup.
I expect to be done by Thanksgiving, assuming I finish one chapter a day until then. I’ll likely tap out below 20K words for this NaNoWriMo, but they’ll have been hard-fought.