Yes, it's another writer writing about writing

I haven't done NaNo for two years and as 2011 has been not-very-productive for me, I decided to sign up as a way of getting up some momentum. I hope.

At the start of this year I worked on pre-publication edits for A Little Death. I then wrote Stay the Night and Temporary Position, giving me an approximate fresh words total of 69k words. I'm not counting the work done on ALD of course, because I'm referring to first drafts only.

69k for the first ten months of this year. Pathetic, considering 2009's total was approximately 400k. You can see why I signed up for NaNo.

And...I'm cheating.

You're supposed to write 50k words on a brand, spanking new idea. Me? I've decided to complete a story which I've already sold and begun to write (yes, in that order) -- Burn. From the start of November, that needed another 11k words to meet my target. I'm making good progress on it.

After that, I'm going to work on a BDSM-lite novella with a target of 35k, which will bring me up to 46k in total.

So after I finish that, I'll write 4k of another story -- probably the already-started idea I had lined up for December -- and I'll be done.

Working on three separate stories, two of which I'd already begun work on, isn't following the rules I know, but I'm trying to think positively. As long as I get writing, that'll be an improvement on recent months. I'll have Burn finished, plus my NaNovella and I'll have made inroads on my next book (M/M vampires). I'll complete that in December, aiming to add another 30k or so to it.

My main goal (after meeting November's word count goal of course) is to keep the momentum going. Other times I've done NaNo, December has seen my word count drop considerably -- usually by half. It's normal for me to do 50k in November and 25k in December. That's still not a bad total, but I don't want January to see me write next to nothing. I want to maintain that productivity. 30k a month would be cool. That's half a novel going by erotic romance epublisher standards, or a complete novella.

That said, I need to leave myself room to work on my agent bait novel on the side, but we'll see how it goes.

Fingers crossed. And given that I wrote absolutely nothing yesterday (damn my social life!) I must get back to work. Wish me luck!