Day 8. You are not even halfway through this thing and you’re flying along. Ten thousand or so words under your belt. Keep writing. Keep tracking it both on your tracker sheet, and of course on the Nano website. Check out your buddies’ progress bars.

Day 9.  If you haven’t got an avatar for the Nanowrimo website, make one now. And write!

Day 10. Donate to Nanowrimo and gain yourself a little golden halo on your avatar.

Day 11. Now that you feel virtuous about your word count and your donation, treat yourself to some great Nanowrimo merch. My collection of T shirts going back 16 years is testament to how thin I used to be. I should probably frame them. Note: you must not buy a WINNER T shirt yet. Stick to pens, notebooks etc.

Day 12. Things are probably getting hard now. 1667 words, every. single. day is hard to sustain even for those who don’t have school/work/kids/pets/parents to care for, which is a very small subset of people. Keep going. Every day you achieve this, you are ahead of a million people who ‘wish they had time to write a book.’ You don’t have time either, yet here you are, doing it.

Day 13. If you’re running out of steam use a bona fide guaranteed Nanowrimo word count boost strategy. Here’s one: write a dream sequence for one of your characters. Usually dream sequences are death to stories as they are to breakfast conversations, but during Nano, they are pure golden wordcount.

Day 14. Here’s another booster: have one character tell another a long, involved story. And celebrate with chocolate or whatever floats your boat, because you are now HALFWAY THROUGH and that is simply awesome.