Ah, Week Two. Week Two is a rather infamous week in NaNoWriMo. It’s the week a majority of participants drop out. If you’re going to drop out at all, you’re going to drop out in Week Two. Week Two is where you stop writing. Week Two is where the optimism ends and the despair begins. If you keep writing, it tends to get better. If you don’t, it’s the end of the line. I’m pretty sure that every year I didn’t finish, the last word written was written in Week Two.

This year, Week Two went like this. On Tuesday, the panic finally started to set in and made up for lost time. On Wednesday, I stopped liking my story and where it was going. On Thursday, I stopped writing. For a few days I had been writing 2000-3000 words a day in an attempt to catch up, but every time I got close, it got to be the end of the day and another 1,667 words were due. I was in a perpetual state of being about 4000 words behind. Cue the annual despair! Which led to not writing a single word in the last three days. And now it’s day fourteen and I have 14,380 words, which is about 9,000 words behind schedule now.

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Seven days and just short of 7,000 words in. I’m about 5,000 words behind schedule and NaNoWriMo’s improved statistics urgently informs me that if I continue at my current pace, I won’t finish until December 21st! Progress has been very slow this first week, especially compared to last year, when the end of week one clocked me in at 16,000 words. This was the first year that I didn’t write a single word on November 1st because I was busy trying to finish all my toning for The Z Train. Even after I finished the comic up on Tuesday though, I was pretty lazy about getting my daily word quota in.

I just don’t feel very panicked yet. It’s weird because usually I’m very high-strung about all this. I have no doubt that the panic will set in eventually, but in the meantime, despite being rather behind, I feel pretty okay about this year’s writing so far. I don’t hate what I’ve written, and I don’t have doubts yet about finishing. After all, I don’t have finals to deal with midway through the month this year. All three of my NaNoWriMo wins happened in college. The  9-to-5 is less stressful, so surely I will finish this year.

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