OCTOBER STATS
Days Writing: 20
New Words: 2,671
New Chapters: 1

Total Word-count: 16,533
Total Chapters: 5

Last month I finished correcting my outline, which finally allows me to focus on advancing my first draft. As such, I am going to start these monthly updates with some statistics. I will report how many words and chapters I have added to the draft, and then what the totals for the entire draft are.

Writing 2,671 is quite low for me, I average about 475 words per day. The reason I only wrote that many was because I decided it would help switch back into my draft-writing context by reading through and polishing all four chapters of my previous work. I ended up making some extensive rewrites of those passages, which word-count I did not take the time to record. This process definitely did help me get back into the draft-writing mindset, and those 2,671 words came out pretty smoothly during the last week of the month.

There seem to be two philosophies for how one should write their novel. One is to write everything out from start to finish, and only then go back to the beginning and smooth the entire thing over. The other approach is to draft as you go, writing one chapter, smoothing it out, and only continuing to the next chapter when the first one feels right. There are pros and cons to each, but I’ve decided to take the latter approach. It will slow me down for finishing this first draft, but it will hopefully result in that draft being closer to a publishable quality.

My goal for October was to write for 22 days, I ended up with 20. Not quite on the mark, but not terrible. In November my family is taking a vacation, and so my writing will be a bit limited. I am going to shoot for 19 days in all, though I might only hit 18. I’m hoping to add about 7,500 words in that time. Come back on December 1st to see how it all turns out.