Oh, God. I find myself in a gigantic hole with 2 days left to go. What a hellish month. There have been so many days that I haven’t been able to write at all. This has, by far, been the most difficult year for me yet in trying to write a novel in November.

Today I start my last-ditch effort at winning for the third year in a row. I have to write 13,190 words between today and tomorrow.

Oh, God.

Things are going differently this year than they have the past two. The biggest difference: I’m behind. The last couple years I would get ahead as much as possible the first week or so, because I know that the going gets much slower as the month wears on.

But not this year. I have an outline to follow, and maybe I’m thinking about things way too much.

The web site — nanowrimo.org — has been painfully slow. I think yesterday was the first time all month I could actually view a page from the site. So my word count on the site is inaccurate — I’m lucky to be able to bring the site up.

I still hate my story. It’s going so slowly that I want to hit my head off the counter.

Yeah, my story sucks. I just realized this today as I attempted to craft an important part of the story’s introduction, and everything went wrong. It just wasn’t happening according to the outline.

That’s right — I had an outline this year. I spent the last couple weeks of October putting an outline together. It’s a story based on a dream I had. For the first time in three years, I’ve come into November with some sort of idea where I’d like my novel to go.

So I’ve already changed things dramatically from what my outline holds, and I’m hoping to fit it in with what else I’ve planned out. We’ll see.