National Novel Writing Month 2025 – Writing Log

The Writing Log – The Novel

Friday, October 31 – 0 words (+0) – Yes! Let’s do this again!

The kids are trick-or-treating, the weather is cold and rainy, I have mulched everything that could be mulched outside the house, the leaves have fallen and there’s weeks to go before there’s a lasting snow cover.  As the song goes, we’re now in the season of the sticks.

But I don’t feel depressed or forlorn.  I’m jittery, eager, purposeful.  I’m about to write an entire novel in thirty days.  This isn’t the first time I attempt this: I did it every year from 2001 to 2010, and then again from 2022 to 2024 (well, okay, I did the 2024 one in January-February 2025 but I still say that counts.  Or, seen another way, I’m about to write a second novel within a year.)  I know from experience that it can be done, and I’m feeling reasonably excited about this year’s premise (“A haunted house story set during a single night in the White House”)  I’ve spent the last six months plotting (with a 3,000-word outline to show for it), refining characters, taking in the news and coming up with a pretty good synopsis.  During the last few weeks, I cleared up my schedule to focus on thirty days of novel-writing.

This doesn’t mean I’m overconfident.  There are many ways in which this could go wrong.  Other than the usual plague, famine and pestilence, the day-job is far more demanding these days than in previous years.  I’m not planning on traveling, but I do have a day-trip to Montréal later this month.  I may try to complete another book project before American Thanksgiving.  My last novel went more slowly than usual because I fell into the classic trap of taking a dumb story seriously enough to care about the plotting, characters and writing.  I’m also, as usual, trying a few more ambitious things.  For instance, this year’s novel is straight-up horror, which is a genre I have occasionally approached in the past, but never at novel length.  The vast majority of the story takes place in the span of twelve hours, which doesn’t give a lot of wiggle room for time-skips and loose plotting.  I don’t plan on big action sequences nor any of my usual SF/action thrills.  I do want to spend more time with the characters, aiming for depth rather than breadth.  I’m still not sure how much humour is going to make it into this novel’s narration.  And while my outline is satisfyingly detailed for the opening chapters of the novel and the conclusion I’m aiming for, it’s uncomfortably sparse in the middle portion of the novel.

Still, I’m optimistic.  Part of the fun of novel-writing is discovering those parts in-between the set-pieces and coming up with new ones.  I write sequentially because every past scene informs the current one.  The single best chapter of my previous novel can from a single line of my outline.  I have a knack for littering my opening chapters with potential ideas and conflicts that can be used later on.  (Heck, in the middle section of my previous novel I threw in an additional conspiracy I wasn’t planning on simply by tying up elements that already existed in the text as written.)  The price to pay may be a few more minutes of staring into space while wondering “what next?”  Or maybe I’ll take a day off to plot rather than write.  But that’s the fun of it.

One last note about the National Novel Writing Month itself — if you’ve been paying attention, you should know that NaNoWriMo (as a formal thing, as an organization, as a web site) is dead — and good riddance: a deviation away from its original objectives, overambitious goals, bad management, and self-inflicted stupidity all led nanowrimo.org to its deserved end.  But I don’t care about the labels: November, for me, remains the (Inter)National Novel Writing Month.  (I tried warming up to Personal Writing Month –PerWriMo–, Novel November –NovNov–, Canadian Novel Writing Month –CaNoWriMo, which I rather like– but nothing stuck.)  The season is right, I’ve been looking forward to this for months and now it’s time to commit.  Onward.

Saturday, November 1st – 6,848 words (+6,848) – What a great start!

I don’t always have the luxury of starting a novel on a Saturday, so I made the most out of it: I stayed home, did an early writing sprint early in the afternoon (writing the entire prologue) then another in the evening, writing nearly half of Chapter One.  I finished on a cliffhanger (as I often do for fun).  I was rusty but not that rusty, and the advantage of having plotted and outlined the first chapters over the past few months are that I had a really good idea of what to do during this first day.  But even then, surprises are creeping in — one of my characters already surprised me by being more of a schemer than I anticipated, so I’m going to roll with it.

I’m not making any grandiose claims about the quality of the prose — but I find myself going back more often and fixing a few words just to get the right flow.  Amusingly enough, I’m anticipating a novel around 60,000 words (horror is best in moderation), which means that I may have already written a tenth of it today.  We’ll see.  I do anticipate one change for the serial readers already — the prologue is meant to be broken apart, with its snippets inserted in-between the sections of the novel.  But readers following along will take it all in at once.  We’ll see how that plays, if they know too much already.

Sunday, November 2 – 11,155 words (+4,307) – Not a bad second day

Today was not like yesterday: in an inversion of my usual weekend, this was a Sunday to go out, visit family, get some groceries, host a visitor and make a lasagna (it turned out pretty well, considering that it was my first-ever lasagna-from-scratch.)  As a result, I came to the novel fairly late in the evening and started by revising existing text.  But once I got into it, things went really well — more than four thousand words in three hours, including adding a bit more punch to a scene written yesterday.  I’m nearly done with the initial tour of our viewpoint characters, and I like how the act of writing is making them come into focus, as well as defining the other characters surrounding them.  While the horror component of the novel hasn’t really begun yet, I’m dropping enough hints of doom along the way that readers shouldn’t feel short-changed.  The initial exposition should end tomorrow, after which the action will become slightly more insistent — although the real horror should begin mid-week.   Eleven thousand words right out of the gate is not bad — that pacing won’t last, but at least I’ve got that done already.

Monday, November 3 – 14,118 words (+2,963) – Back to a normal pace

My overall objective for the month is 3,000 words per day, so today was a far more normal day than the last two.  Then there’s the fact that we’re out of Chapter One’s exposition, and the real work of moment-to-moment plotting begins — it takes a little bit more time figuring out where to go next and how to get there.  Nonetheless, and for a workday, this is pretty good.  Our main characters are introduced, they’re all converging toward the White House, and we’re this close to beginning the intense locked-room twelve-hour period during which most of the novel takes place.  I should be done with Chapter Two tomorrow, and then things get interesting.

Tuesday, November 4 – 15,682 words (+1,564) – Eh, not good

Disappointing tally tonight — Although, to be fair, I had to attend a non-profit board meeting that dragged for twice as long as usual, and that seriously cut into my writing time.  I could go on for another hour, but I choose sleep: Big day at work tomorrow and I won’t be any good either during the day or after work if I don’t get enough rest.  I was still able to write a solid exposition scene laying down the foundations of what’s going to happen next, throw in a few character moments, and while I couldn’t end on a cliffhanger, at least it’s a solid line of dialogue.  Chapter Two continues tomorrow, as our characters should all be inside the White House by the end of the writing session.

Wednesday, November 5 – 17,613 words (+1,931) – Better, but not where I want to be

Overall, things are not going badly — I still managed near two thousand words despite not having all of my time to myself this evening, and struggling a bit with the usual “how do I arrange things in the best way to get to my next high point?” head-scratching.  At least I completed three scenes and got a bit further to the end of Chapter Two. I also did some necessary research today, which does not count as writing, but still goes against the making of the novel.  I read about White House history some more, revisited the 360-degree virtual online exhibit that allows you to tour the public areas of the White House, and poked around pictures and explanations about the building.  I’m clearly not meeting my 3,000 daily words objective, but at least I’m making progress.  One funny thing: About a week ago, to check whether I understood my four main characters well enough, I held a mock “panel discussion” with my characters in which I got them to talk together about various topics (this is not a mental condition — it’s a writing exercise), and one imagined interaction between two main characters had me laughing aloud.  I liked it so much that I managed to throw it into the text during this evening’s writing session.

Thursday, November 6 – 20,063 words (+2,450 words) – Slow progress in the valley.

Every novels has peak and valleys, and part of the necessary role of valleys is to prepare the terrain for the peaks.  I recognize that I’m in the inglorious part of the novel — where I have to set up the pieces required for the next peak to hit even harder.  That means exposition, sketching out the environment in which our haunted-house story will take place, and setting up the characters and the tensions between them. (“Stocking up Chekov’s Wall”, as I called it in a previous novel.) At the same time, it’s a balance in not telling so much right away that the rest will feel like repetition.  I managed two scenes today, still exposition, but I hope interesting exposition blended with character development and creepy portents.  Hence a minor injury to one of our main characters in which blood is spilled (inspired by something that happened to me in a Quebec City hotel, no less) that will pay off in unexpected ways later (ah, the joy with working with supernatural tropes!), the increased weight of an antagonist coming to the fore through increasingly less distant actions, and trying to further portray the apocalyptic context in which this novel is taking place.  My pace is not where I hope it would be, but I’m still making excellent progress considering the date and my expected word-count.  I’m not sure about the progress I’ll be able to make this weekend: Tomorrow evening looks fine, Saturday looks like a prolonged family outing, and Sunday looks like I’ll be staying home while the season’s first snowstorm will hit.  As usual, we’ll see.