Novelistic Progress

I passed the 20,000 word mark on my novel last night!  After passing the 13,500 word mark, it became the longest thing I've ever written.  I don't know how long this is going to be, but I'm still working on a lot of setup.  50,000 is the number to shoot for during NaNoWriMo, but that's actually pretty short for a novel and I'm hoping this will be significantly longer.

Speaking of NaNoWriMo, if I write 1,000 words per day on this novel, I'll get it over the 50,000 word mark before November.  That's probably doable on most days now that I'm in the groove, but even so, I'm not sure this novel will be done by November.  I want to do NaNo this year--I even signed up several months ago--but I'm not sure what to do if this novel isn't finished yet.  I certainly don't want to halt its progress to work on something else.  Originally I'd been hoping to spend October outlining and researching my next novel (I need to do a fair bit of research on plausible orbital space colonies and world-ending natural disasters) but I'm not sure how much time I'm going to have.  I suppose I could work on two at once like my husband does--he researches and outlines one screenplay during downtime at work, and writes a second in the evenings--but I'm concerned about getting them confused, or having trouble moving between them, or breaking the momentum of both.  I suppose one option would be to do some researching and outlining in October and then, come November, just keep writing this current novel until it's finished.  Then, once the first novel is finished I can immediately start the second one.  Yes, this isn't quite playing by their rules, but I'd  only count the words written during the month, and I'd still be trying for 50,000 total words of new prose in November.  And hey, the whole point of joining was to get myself to write a novel this year, which I've begun to do earlier than I anticipated.  Hopefully I'll write two novels this year!

I've finally gotten into a groove when it comes to the novel writing.  In fact, I've written for the last 22 days straight, and the word counts on those days have increased as time has gone on--making me hopeful that I can get to the 1670 necessary to complete NaNo.  This is definitely my longest streak.  The last record was 16.  (This is all since I started keeping track back in February, but I'm pretty sure this is the longest streak ever, since, even as a student, I took days off between projects--and it's very easy to take breaks between short stories.)  If I can get up to 30 without missing a day, I think I'll look for a ticker to put on the side of my blog labelled "Days Without Not Writing."  Even the pathetic days when I only write 150-300 words (which has happened a few times) I at least didn't break the streak.  Each day that increases this record makes me not want to break it even more.