We’re doing this Mini NaNoWriMo thing so that we don’t have to write 1,700 words a day. It seemed like such a good idea at the time; after all, what else happens in November? Nothing, that’s what. Nothing.

Strangely, the real world disagrees with this appraisal. We’ve already decided October will be known on IWDTFM as ‘Sad October‘ thanks to the lack of new content we produced, but November is shaping up to be pretty busy too. Our workloads are still high and – more importantly – Dan and I are firmly engrossed in Tekken during our evenings.

Even so, I’ve hit my target three days running, and have a November word count somewhere in the region of 1,800, which will of course be dwarfed by anyone who is doing the proper NaNoWriMo. In fact, it’s dwarfed by my own girlfriend, who – despite not formally taking part in either challenge – has written a 2,000 word story since Sunday.

My word count may be relatively low, but this weekend I intend to take advantage of one of my primary reasons of not doing the full NaNoWriMo: I’m going to do some planning. I need to take stock of where my story currently stands (I’ve written about 14,500 words in total), and this involves me sitting down for a couple of hours and mapping out the plot. Effectively, I have two main storylines with two distinct sets of characters, and that’s going to take some work.

I also need to find some days when I can write more than 500 words, because at some point I need to stitch all my short chunks together. I read somewhere that Terry Pratchett writes 400 words a day – no more, no less – and he must suffer from the same problems that I can foresee me suffering from: continuity and consistency. At some point, there’ll be some serious editing going on…

Kate: Who would have thought just 500 words a day would be that hard? I’m now below target, as I didn’t do any words on Tuesday. But with a few extra words from November 1 under my belt, I’m not so far behind that I can’t catch up…

Daniel: Predictably, I found zero time in the last two evenings in which to put any more work into my mini-novella. I did have a good think about themes and settings on the journey home though! And this time I wrote down these thoughts. Some well-deserved time off is approaching, and I am happy to wile away much of it catching up with the others.

It is definitely less intimidating to be doing a half-NaNoWriMo, but not enough to force myself to do the meagre 500 words necessary to be on track every day. Not with Tekken, drinking, eating and sleeping factored into the day’s activities.

Kate and Geoff are actively encouraging me to jack-up my participation, and by encouraging I mean berating my lack of effort with gusto.

Are you participating? How are you getting on? Let us know!