AmWriting | robertpeecher

Just a quick update on my post from yesterday about NaNoWriMo …

I started writing in earnest last night around 11 p.m. When I went to bed at 4 a.m., I’d managed to knock out 4,000 words. I’ve gotten an accurate word count of everything I’ve written so far in November on High Tide, and I’m 19,496 words into the 50,000 (that includes the 4,000 I wrote last night). If I can hit a pace of 5,084 words a day, I can finish out NaNoWriMo!

I’m really excited about what I wrote last night. I think it’s pretty good stuff. It was a scene that came to me more than two years ago when I first started writing about Jackson Speed, and it is the moment in the Battle of Gettysburg when Speed earns himself a Congressional Medal of Honor.

I have this print of a painting by Dale Gallon hanging in my office at home, and it helped to serve as inspiration for me as I wrote the scene. I love Dale Gallon’s work, and if I’m ever a rich man I’ll paper my house with his paintings.

That’s it for now … I have to get to writing!

Six days left in NaNoWriMo and I’m ready to get started. 50,000 words in six days? No sweat.

For those not familiar, November is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo for short). The goal is to write 50,000 words in 30 days.

Somewhere along the way I became intrigued with the idea of participating in NaNoWriMo. I wrote the first Jackson Speed novel (El Teneria) in 28 days. It came in around 60,000 words. But I did that in June of 2012, so I picked the wrong month to do it and it didn’t count. But I figured if I could do it once, I could do it again.

My initial plan for NaNoWriMowas to write the fifth Jackson Speed novel, and in October I sort of started doing research for that book. But I never really got moving on the research the way I needed to. And I’m still writing the fourth book, and I found it harder than I thought I would to switch from one book to another.

The rules of NaNoWriMo allow me to finish an already-started novel as long as I write 50,000 words in 30 days. I was already just over 50,000 words into High Tide, and I’ve always figured it would be close to 100,000 words (much longer than the other three Speed novels, but it is Gettysburg, after all).

So a couple of weeks ago I abandoned my initial plans and decided to just keep rolling on the fourth book, Jackson Speed at the High Tide.

But November has been terribly busy for me. The boys have had soccer games and tournaments on the weekends and it’s been cold and I’ve been sleepy a lot. The result is I haven’t been writing much at all.

I’ve got six days left in NaNoWriMo and I’ve written somewhere between 16,000 and 20,000 words. So I’m not really starting from scratch with just six days to go, but I am very much in a hole.

But I’ve not given up. If I can write an average of 5,000 words over the next six days, I can still win NaNoWriMo, and I think I can do it. I’ve got a couple of days off from work this week thanks to Thanksgiving, and there’re no soccer games this weekend.

So I’m deep in a hole, but I’m committed to seeing this thing through.

I’ll post an update December 1 (or sometime thereabouts) and let you know how it turned out.

In the meantime, keep watching this space. My hope is to release some short stories prior to Christmas for all you people who have Kindles on your wish lists.