Here is Karen’s novel writing log from this month:

Nov. 1 – Brad and I both hit our goals for today. And we didn’t drive each other crazy. Not that I thought we would, but we haven’t ever written together like this. Good day.
Nov. 3 – What are the odds that both my computers would die the first week of Nano? My laptop motherboard went first, and just after I’d gotten everything transferred over to my laptop, it refused to boot. I am now writing on a combination of old barely functional computers and paper, but persevering.
Nov. 5 – All day workshop today; no writing.
Nov. 6 – Today I assembled all the fragments and got it back together in yWriter (on an old laptop – very slow). Passed 20k words though so apparently my word count isn’t suffering from all this.
Nov. 7 – It’s Monday and the start of week 2. My new computer should be here mid-week. Can’t wait. In the meantime, I’m writing.
Nov. 8 – Snow on the mountains for the first time this year this morning.
Nov. 11- 11/11/11 – I hit 40,000 words today. Would like to get to 50k before I go on my trip next week, but have a lot of work things going on next week, so we’ll see. New laptop arrived.
Nov. 14 – Today was the first day work totally intruded on my writing. :(
Nov. 15 – Hit 50,000 today. And pretty much right at the end of my novel. That’s amazing. Looking forward to moving on to editing and some rewrite and then having it read.

I am very proud that Brad did so well, not only finishing, but finishing early. This was quite a bigger and newer task for him than for me (I’ve always been a big writer). Well done!

And here are some thoughts from Brad:

I found this adventure easier and harder than I’d imagined. Taking Karen’s p2pu prep class before we started was the only reason I finished. Even so I was unprepared, but without it… I hate to think what a mess that would have been.

The number of words I can write on a good day might be 3000. On bad days, it’s more like 1500. It would have been nice to know this before hand. A better outline would mean more good days.

The thing I liked the least was that my story deviated too much from my plan. That’s not really true. The really worst part was when scenes I imagined and loved turned out blah and boring. The best part was actually taking a story from my head and writing it down and feeling that it made sense. I feel proud about getting through it. It was a lot to write.

I’d like to write a bunch of short stories this next year to see if I can get a better handing on this whole storytelling business before trying anything like this again.