"I'll show you how it's done." - Me, June 8, 2009

Let's get this out of the way: Entering NaNoWriMo is a dumb idea to begin with, so jumping in after one week has passed is unquestionably idiotic, and a near-guarantee of failure, especially while working close to 50 hours a week. So why did I succeed after a mere 15 days?

1) My novel is about a writer who creates a NaNoWriMo novel. This opens up all sorts of possibilities...when I procrastinate, my character procrastinates. When I played Super Mario 3 instead of writing my novel, so did my character. There's lots of stuff in there that's fabricated as well, but the procrastination bits really helped to speed things along.

2) I had completed this contest twice before and knew what to expect. And since I was a week behind, I knew I had to write 3,000 words per day. By the time I was caught up, I had such momentum that ramping up production and finishing early was quite easy.

3) My story has no plot (and the protagonist notes this several times.) My two previous attempts did have one, and were a lot harder to write. I now know that you can get by on characters, settings, and theme alone.

4) My novel was set in the not-so-distant past (2002) which I found to be a lot of fun. There are references to 9/11 of course, and there are references to the dot com crash, GameCube, the Anaheim Angels winning the World Series, the iPod, the re-election of Grey Davis as Governor of California, Windows XP, etc. The characters also speculated about the not-so-distant future from time to time. The possibilities were endless.

5) I wrote on my old piece of shit desktop PC. Two reasons: my MacBook does not have a word processor that's worth two shits, and the PC is not connected to the internet, so the distraction was not constantly tempting me.

6) Timing myself. Knowing how fast I was typing the thing gave me a rough idea of how long it was going to take me to finish. When you translate 15,000 words to seven hours, forty two minutes, it means something completely different. Granted, anyone who has tried to write for seven hours and forty two minutes knows what that's like, and it rarely works out the way you think (unless you're like Chris and write the bulk of it in the last day.) However, it did allow me to manage my time much more efficiently and give myself realistic goals of what could be achieved in a given time period.

And so, ladies and gentlemen, I present to you Working Title, by the numbers:

Words: 50,080

Chapters: 10

Shortest Chapter: 251 words

Longest Chapter: 15,039 words

Actual time spent in the contest: 15 days, 2 hours, 7 minutes

Actual time spent writing: 24 hours, 30 minutes

Longest writing session: 3 hours, 11 minutes, on June 21

Shortest writing session: 13 minutes on June 17

Most efficient writing session: 3,449 words completed in 1 hour, 29 minutes on June 21 (38.75 wpm)

Least efficient writing session: 1,441 words completed in 55 minutes on June 8 (26.2 wpm)

Fuck: 66

Shit: 55

Ass: 11

Cockadookie: 1

References to The Big Lebowski: 2 (Main character is named Arthur, after Arthur Digby Sellers, and a computer repair guy is named Knutsen.)

Words about the Oakland Raiders: 6,938

Words about Super Mario 3: 4,828

Words about Adaptation (a self-referencing film released in 2002, but after my novel takes place) 809

Words about craps and casino gambling: 4,523

Words about NaNoWriMo itself: At least 2,368