NaNoWriMo 2022: Days 21-25

Total word count: 6269

Thanksgiving week went about as expected, as I’ve been writing only in fits and starts. However, in contrast with the sprint-like pace of 1,667 words/day of a typical NaNoWriMo project, 250/day is easy to catch up with.

I’ve come around to a point-of-view a writer friend proposed, when I discussed my then-current NaNoWriMo project with her some years ago. To paraphrase, she preferred a slower pace, as inevitably you’d have to unstitch your NaNo draft, fix some frayed edges, replace pieces wholesale, or even change the pattern. A slower pace means easier course corrections.

A tangent. Although it’s more of a historical oddity now, 250 is the average number of words that would fit on a page formatted to manuscript guidelines common in the publishing industry: 12-point Courier font, double-spaced, 1-inch margins. I haven’t submitted to publishing houses in years, but when I last had some were beginning to loosen those guidelines, instead relying on counts generated by whatever word processor you used. (The official NaNoWriMo site always relied on the latter.)

Although I’m using a pageless document format, I’ve been writing a page a day on average.