I’m at 50K but need to keep going. I am so new at this I don’t even know how long the average novel is suppose to be. I’m guessing 100K so will keep writing. I like Scrivener, it crashes easily on my Win7 but I haven’t lost more than two or three words.
Average length depends a lot on the genre–and other factors, of course, but editors/publishers usually will have a figure in mind for first-time authors in specific genres. Given that you’re just banging out the first draft (or so I assume), I’d focus more on getting to the end of the story than worrying about hitting 80K or 100K or going over into 120K–you’re going to end up rewriting a ton of it afterward anyhow if you decide to keep working with it. That’s my method, at least: deal with the story and getting words and ideas on paper (or the computer, as it is) and then once I’ve got something solid to work with, start shaping that more nicely into the real book. I’m sure others have completely different ways of doing it–I know a lot of people have specific word count targets per scene that it helps them to stick to when getting down the draft.
Regarding the crashing, you may want to try backing up your projects and then uninstalling the NaNoWriMo trial if that’s what you’re using and instead download and install the standard 1.0 trial. There’ve been a handful of bug fixes since the NaNo trial, including one or two crashers that may be what you’re experiencing. The regular trial gives you 30 days of use, rather than a set expiration date, so you’ll be able to finish out NaNoWriMo and carry on into December (and beyond, depending how frequently you use the program). You can grab the latest version of 1.0 from here.
Finished and this has been a bad month, a laptop that decided to die on me, Dell have managed to replace motherboard twice, hard drive once, heat sink, fan and one half of my memory. Still caught up and glad its done.
I haven’t been officially doing NaNoWriMo – I was already 49,200 words into a projected-100,000 word novel as of October 31st – but I’ve been using NaNo as a pace car.
And this evening I slid past 101,000 words (with 5-10,000 words still to go to finish the first draft). So I guess I passed the 50,000 word mark in November without noticing
Finishing a work in progress during NaNo just makes you a “rebel.” There’s even a forum for your kind, and you still have time to set up and paste in the words you wrote during November for validation. Joins us!
I’m a day behind, but have the day off. I’ve written 300 words today… only 2700 to go so that I catch up. I think I’ll go make some tea… take a nap…
I’m very out indeed. Got sidetracked, started writing something else, forgot all about NaNoWriMo, didn’t write anything at all for two weeks on any project, had a rush of blood to the head and started a third writing project, spent ages fiddling around with timelines and subplot intersections rather than actually putting pixels to paper, remembered NaNoWriMo this weekend, thought “oh bother”, couldn’t remember what NaNoWriMo project was about, decided it probably wasn’t worth picking it up again if I couldn’t remember anything about it, and gave up. Not a stellar year! And definitely not a winner.
Oh! Dear me…Mistress Astrid…may the saints preserve us. A woeful example to set before the impressionable malcontents of Scrivener’s crew. I fear the worst.