The first week of AugNoWriMo has gone reasonably well - I completed chapters 6 & 7, and posted them to the CWIL website (mostly so I wouldn't be tempted to fiddle with them too much!). I do need to speed up a bit, though - 37,000 is more than 10 chapters at my average word count.

Total so far: 5597 (1119 per day)

Some bad nights' sleep this week owing to the sudden bout of hot weather, but I'm making reasonable progress. Chapters 8, 9 and 10 are now finished, so only one more to go and I've reached the end of Act One :D

On the down-side, if anything I seem to be slowing down :(

This week's total: 7811 (1115 per day)
Total so far: 13,408 (1117 per day)

This week I've been busy at work and not written much, so it's ironic that I've also just discovered a podcast for fiction writers called "I Should Be Writing", by SF writer and Lulu.tv podcast producer Mur Lafferty. It's great for listening to on the bus on days when it's too crowded for me to get out my Alphasmart. And anyone who uses Londo Mollari from Babylon 5 as their example of a great tragic character gets the thumbs-up from me!

This week has been a big struggle to write - I've been busy at work (release deadline for Ensembl) and stuck on a Big Chapter, i.e. the big murder scene in my whodunnit. So, I more or less gave up trying to fight the block on work days, and just listened to "I Should Be Writing" :)

And you know - it worked!

This weekend, flushed by my success on Friday, I sat down to tackle the Big Chapter. The problem was that I had not just one but two crimes to include - arson and murder - and any number of potential suspects, so it was a pretty daunting task. But, as with most things, I found that breaking it down into stages was a big help.

This week's total: 2601 (372 per day)
Total so far: 16,009 (843 per day)

Whilst revising the outline for Acts Two and Three of "Powderkeg Walk", I encountered a problem. When I wrote the first draft, I envisaged ten days as being sufficiently long for the crime to be solved but short enough to add suspense. However the revised outline contains too many major events to plausibly fit into such a short time span.

Once again I was saved by my nigh-obsessive attention to historical detail...

I've had to reduce my AugNoWriMo target to 25,000 words - after my block over Chapter 11, there was no way I was going to catch up and still retain my sanity!

This week, I concentrated on getting my outline firmed up, particularly for the first four chapters of Act Two, which is now my milestone for this month. I had a bit of a slump mid-week when it was announced that the Foleo could be delayed until late September or even October, but I stuck at the outlining and made some progress in the end.

With my way ahead clear, I've been able to revise part of Chapter 12 and the whole of Chapters 13 and 14 (I'm saving the new material that begins Chapter 12 for next week). That will give me plenty of material to submit for critique this autumn!

This week's total: 4765 (681 per day)
Total so far: 20,774 (799 per day)

OK, so August doesn't have five weeks, but this is my fifth (and final) report on my AugNoWriMo progress.

Despite having to lower my initial target, I feel pretty damned good! Once the finish line was in sight I put on a spurt and finished early (just like I did for NaNoWriMo - I wonder if this is shaping up to be a habit?). I've left the story at a good point, where my hero is about to start his mission, and I have a little over 38,500 words of half-way decent manuscript completed. Yay!

This week's total: 4336 (1445 per day)
Grand total: 25,110 (866 per day)