11/21/2025
Week Three of NovNov/NaNoWriMo 2025 I’m on track to 200k!
It's third week of National Novel Writing Month. I’ve not been keeping track of weekly words, so, not sure weekly count of exact day count. I come in NovNov each night, log my word total for the day, and that says right now:
“178,610/50,000, Average daily word 8,506 words”
…so I’ll likely reach 200k by the end of the month.
I’m only including story, nothing else. (I’ve been asked a few times now if the reason I reached over 100k was because it was including worldbuilding - no it’s not). The reason is I am a full time career author, I’ve published over 100 novels since 1978, and I use a combination secretary touch typing (my average speed is 91 words a minute aka around 5k words an hour) and speech to text. So writing is my full time job, so I’m also not juggling the writing with work/school/ect. I’m also bedridden/wheelchair bound/relearning to walk, and so I’m stuck in one room with 24 hours a day of nothing else to do. I could sit in my wheelchair doing nothing but stare out the window, or I can type. I choose to type.
But also, I’m writing the same series I was writing back in the 1970s. I’ve never written anything else. So I’ve not done much in terms of worldbuilding or character creation since the mid-1980s. I’ve been writing the same 3 main characters in the same solar system of 5 inhabited planets, for 48 years now, so ALL of my time is dedicated to just writing the story itself, because I’ve sort of got a plug and play modular system.
By that I mean: I have the planets and cultures and biomes all built. I have the main characters all fleshed out. I’ve been writing both for enough decades that I know my way around the worlds and I know without thinking what my characters will do. So all I need is the story idea, and drop my characters into it, then write how they react.
My method is very “improv style”, and doesn’t fit well into either pantsing or plotting. What I do for the November writing challenge (this is my 21st year) is, in October I compile a bunch of writing prompts (usually find them on Pintrest) and TTRPG random encounter dice roll charts.
I’ve built a modular universe where EVERYTHING plugs in. Everything. Toss Rory dice at me and I'm off having my character encounter everything the Rory Dice gave in that roll. Open r/writingprompts, and whatever the top/newest one is, I throw it at my character and run with it. Sling anything off Seventh Sanctum or Chaotic Shiny at my character and he'll find a way to use it. This system makes it so I can always write something daily, and by publishing daily, it also offers the option to include readers. Readers can comment "I dare you to have him..." and next day, that's the writing prompt.
It's kind of almost like writing fanfiction in a way. Because I created the world and characters years ago, my characters and worlds are muscle memory. That frees the creative energy for pure storytelling. So I'm able to not use plots or outlines, because I just know the characters well enough to just have fun writing what they do in reaction to whatever the writing prompt heaps in their path this time.
Each morning of November, I grab a writing prompt at random, put a bench/seat/log/something to sit on in it, and sit my main character on it. Then I roll a dice, check the random encounter chart. And start writing. No plot, no problem. I start in mid conversation dialogue, main character talking to husband, and a combination of the writing prompt and the dice roll result show up, and they react to it.
Most times the story ends between 1k to 3k words. If so, I move on to the next writing prompt, repeat with a new dice roll. Do this until I have 3 stories. After I finish the third story, I come here long the combined total of the 3.
I’m pantsing it, so I have no clue what any story is gonna be until I write it. I love that once I start a story, it’s like an adventure, like it feels like I’m reading the story, rather then writing it, and it’s just so much fun.
The series goes full bizzaro/absurdism/kitchen-sink logic/comedy, so I’m able to do anything - like in one story a portal opened over their heads and a 1960s VW Bus feel out of the sky, nearly landed on them. That kind of Looney Tunes acme anvil falling from the clouds logic, makes it super easy to write a lot of words fast, because I don’t have to worry “does this make sense?” I can just let stuff happen, and it’s loads of fun to write that way instead of trying to be serious and match real world physics.
I think that contributes to the speed of typing as well. Because I’m writing in a very “1980s Saturday Morning Cartoon Logic” when it comes to “world rules vs laws of physics”. So I’m never having to stop to research either. Like I don’t have to ask: “Can a person survive a fall from a five story building?” because I can just have my character fall off a hundred story building and land safely on a flying carpet or something, and because readers know that’s just the kind of world it is, they don’t bat an eye at it.
So I have this level of “I can write whatever, and it’s always gonna work” which helps during November, because I don’t have to keep stopping and researching stuff. Every minute of researching is a minute not writing.
I think if I was writing a more serious genre, I wouldn’t be able to rake up word counts so fast. like if I was writing a historical I’d actually have to research dates of events and such, or if I was writing a murder mystery, I’d have to carefully plot out all the clues and where to put them; or if I was writing hard scifi, I’d have to know gravitational pull and stuff, and I wouldn’t be able to do half the stuff I do on my 5 planets in my world.
I’m also fast release publishing, with almost zero editing. I have a prefab template for my books, and just drop the story text into it, and publish straight to Amazon as ebook, paperback, and hardcover within an hour of finishing my writing for the day. I’m writing a full story every day.
So, for NovNov, the only stuff I count is the actual text that I paste into the book template.
When I highlight in Google Docs to copy it to my KDP template, it gives me the word count, and that’s the word count I use. So anything written that got deleted during editing, is not counted either. For me, only the end product words that my readers read in the published books get counted, nothing else. But that’s also why I don’t have word count charts for daily/weekly word counts either. I’m just not keeping track.
I’m typing in EditPad which doesn’t track word counts, so only time I ever see the word counts is when I copy the text over to Google Doc and do the editing. So while I’m doing the actual typing of the story, I’ve no clue what word count it stops at.
I publish 1 to 3 short stories daily, (short stuff goes on GumRoad, Vocal, Patreon, Blogger, and Medium, long stuff goes on Amazon) and 2 to 4 novellas a month, all year long, this is my 48th year doing that, so word count isn’t that important to me. End product is. My readers don’t care what the word counts are, they just want to know “Is it a short story, novella, or novel?”
So when I publish, I give the book a tagline:
—“Title: A Short Story” for everything under 20k words (under 100 printed pages).
—“Title: A Novella” for everything 20k to 75k words (100 to 200 printed pages); and
—“Title: A Novel” for everything over 75k words (over 200 printed pages) (my longest novel is 175k words, over 500 printed pages).
My readers know (because I’ve told them in the copyright pages inside the books) that this is how I divide my series up. So people looking for something they can read in under an hour, there are short stories, for people looking for 3 or 4 hour reads there are novellas, and for people looking to spend a couple of days in a book there are novels.
Readers tend to be more concerned with pages and don’t think in terms of word counts. And word counts were more important when dealing with traditional publishing houses, but I don’t do that anymore, I switched to self publishing, so I stopped fussing over word counts.
I think because I'm working on a long running - decades of daily publishing - series, that has a fan base already reading it and their expectations of a publishing schedule, that that as well keeps me from slacking off. No over-editing, no perfectionism loops, no research rabbit holes, no self-doubt spirals, no second-guessing canon... BECAUSE readers don't wait. You miss a day and they start screaming "You're doing a GRR Martin on us!" so I simply can not waste time doing anything other then getting work done.
I mean... it is my full time job, soooo... I can't afford to dilly dally around in procrastinationville, you know?
I’m not doing a novel, instead my goal was 30 stories in 30 days, with a hope to maybe do 90 stories in 30 days, thus why I write 2 more after I finish the first one.
So far this month, most of my stories are 2k to 3k words each, with a few in the 750 to 1k word range, a couple that reached 7k words range, and one that reached just under 14k words. All the stories are part of a series set, featuring a transgender main character and his two husbands, all of the stories are set during a zombie apocalypse, but the stories themselves are Cozy Fantasy Slice of Life, mostly dealing with the every day struggles of living in the apocalypse and trying to live a normal (not apocalypse) life.
Biggest challenge, I had planned to publish every story soon as I finished it to my Patreon, but so far I’ve only published maybe one quarter of them on Patreon; mostly because by the time I get done writing I’m too tired to do anything and fall asleep.
Guess I’ll be spending most of december catching up on publishing them all of Patreon.
Overall though, I’ve having a blast.
I’ve been doing the 50k/30days thing every November since 2004, so this is my 21st year of doing it, and I’ve reached 200k every year since 2006, and from the numbers I’ve got right now, I’m on track to reach 200k this year too. Very excited about that even thought it was not my word count goal.
I’ve hit 200k nearly every year for almost two decades, because my entire writing ecosystem is optimized for it, but, that's not something that happened over night -like i said, I created these characters and their world in the 1970s, I already knew them inside out before the internet existed, so I never go into November having to build a new world or a new set of characters, and yeah, that does take a lot of time. So I do recommend my system IF you already have a series and established world and characters. Like if you are writing for Royal Road or something, this should work for you. But I do NOT recommend my system if you are just starting out. It really does rely on you not needing to do any level of worldbuilding, character creating, or research at all, in order to reach this kind of word counts; that and not having "work or school" either. I don't recomend others try to reach 200k in 30 days if they are just starting out. I only recommend trying it if you already have a series going and are aiming to write for that series.
