Lady Isabella’s story came to a satisfying conclusion on Day 10 with a solid 17,244 words added to the book and a final length of almost 90,000 words…a bit long for that series, but we’ll see where it ends up after editing.

I’d love to be able to tell you that during those first 10 days, I completed the outline for Traps and Treachery so I could roll over into my intended project without a blink, but it would be a lie. I do find it amusing that after posting my wish to discover a built-in synopsis of the next book in Steam and Shadows (which I didn’t), that same day, the shape of the story finally came together. I wrote an initial synopsis that covers all the major points and gets us to where we need to be for the final volume of the series (well, in the main thread). In other words, I’m not as much in the dark about it as I was when writing the Day 8 update.

Oh, and the next day, I had a vague memory surface of scenes that were not in Steam and Shadows and belonged in Traps and Treachery. I wasted a lot of time looking for them, but it turned out to be a victory. I found they had not made it past very detailed scene blurbs, and at the same time, I discovered the NaNo spreadsheet for last year when I’d decided I hadn’t used one. (I did take a bit to reorganize once I realized I’d failed to keep a bunch of things in their proper folders.) This gave me a running start of 4 scene blurbs and ended up giving me 6 because one was so complicated I broke it into 3. I’ve since added 6 more and written 5 of those.

I need to get more outline because I will catch up to myself eventually. Since my scenes range from 1000 (and sometimes lower) to over 2000, each scene cannot be counted on to fulfill my NaNo writing goal. Besides, the better I understand where I’m going, the better I can assist my characters in getting there.

So, where am I now? I am running 2,752 words ahead of where I need to be (not including today) which means I have just about 1.5 days leeway should I need to take a day off, or have a series of short days.

Traps and Treachery now stands at 7,229 (excluding any world building notes), which is still early in the novel. Whether I will achieve the 50k in pure story words is very much in question at this point, but my Frankenstein NaNo project is still well within reach of the 50k all told (and no, blog posts don’t count).

Here are my actual stats. The first number is cumulative, the second per day (you can see I’ve had to lean on my cushion quite a few times already, but I’ve had more days where I went over):

Day 1 – 1692 – 1692
Day 2 – 3172 – 1480
Day 3 – 3997 – 825
Day 4 – 6242 – 2245
Day 5 – 8102 – 1860
Day 6 – 10929 – 2827
Day 7 – 13158 – 2229
Day 8 – 14622 – 1464
Day 9 – 16329 – 1707
Day 10 – 18565 – 2236
Day 11 – 20835 – 2270
Day 12 – 22911 – 2076
Day 13 – 24349 – 1438
Day 14 – 26090 – 1741

So, how are your November projects going? Do you outline? If so, were you fully prepared when the month started, or are you scrambling as I am? If you’re not writing, just curious, how are you spending your November? Doing anything fun?