Getting over the hump (day)

Happy hump day, otherwise known as Wednesday on any given week, but this Wednesday is particularly “humpy” because it marks the time when National Novel Writing participants really SHOULD be over that 25,000 word hump and on the downhill slope of their novel. I’m proud to say I have only 2 writing buddies on the NaNoWriMo site who have not yet traversed that 25,000 hill yet, although they’re both in the 20,000’s, so it should be any moment now. My other buddies have word counts ranging from the lower-to-mid-30’s (which is also where I am) to the upper 70’s (over-achievers!).

If the NaNoWriMo stats from the Denver area participants are any indication, this arduous task becomes harder the longer you’re at it.

 Let’s analyze this graphic I uploaded when I passed 25,000 words, most notably the graphic in the lower right hand corner, which shows the cumulative word count of all the WriMo’s in Denver. You will notice that we all passed 8 million words half-way through day number 6, but by day 14, we still hadn’t doubled that to 16 million.  In fact, we’re now at day 18, and it still doesn’t look like the cumulative word count has reached 16 million.

We’re all slowing down…  Maybe that means the books have been finished and the word count totals have been reached; I would need to know the total number of Denver participants to determine that.  But my guess is that this Hump day REALLY is a hump day, and we all desperately need that downhill slope.  Well, it’s there, right at word 25,001 it begins going downhill.   So I challenge the rest of my mentorees to get over that hump. And for those of you who already have, keep it up. You’re doing great.

Here are my stats for NaNoWriMo for Nov 18: