This tells me you’re ready, Dascha! You have a plan for what you want to accomplish this month that will help you stay on track and prioritize the parts you want to focus on.
My first NaNo went something like this:
The first 10K was all scene writing, and I stayed mostly on track with the daily word count. I was maybe one day behind when I hit the first milestone but was really proud of what I was able to accomplish so far. I’d made it through my first week and was ready to tackle week two.
I got a little further behind in week 2 because I was feeling burnt out from the intensity of scene writing at this advanced pace and was also thrown by the election (this was 2016.) I don’t have access to my word count graph from the previous years since the website updated everything this year, but I remember getting worried that I would start to get too far behind that I wouldn’t be able to catch up. But I changed writing tactics and switched from scene writing to fast drafting how I thought the rest of the first book was going to go. Since I was drafting a trilogy I knew I would have a lot to explore, and this more relaxed discovery writing approach went much faster, but I was still behind when I hit the 20K mark in the second week.
In week 3 I asked my mother-in-law to watch my daughter for me a couple hours one day while I wrote enough words to catch back up to what I was supposed to have written by that day to stay on track to hit 50K on time. I finished fast drafting Book 1 about this time and I hit 30K and 40K that week by continuing to fast draft as much as I could see would happen for the next 2 books.
I took a little break for Thanksgiving since we were traveling 3 hours to stay with family members for the weekend. I needed this break so I could enjoy the holiday and recoup my writing energy for the final 10K push to 50K. I would only have a few days to get to the final milestone and would have some big writing days to make it happen, but what I wanted was to go through everything I’d written so far and write a continuous 10K fast draft of Books 1–3 of the trilogy project so that when I was ready to come back to this project later I would have a way to quickly read through the whole idea as I saw so far. This included fast drafting the 10K of scene writing I did in the first week.
I finished a day early after a nearly 5K day of fast drafting! I was really happy with what I had and it was nice to enjoy the last day of the month without feeling stressed about making it to 50K in time to “win” for NaNo.
Sorry this was such a long response! Basically the takeaway from my first NaNo experience was that I needed to adjust strategies as I went along so that I could stay on track to accomplish what I wanted out of the 5oK goal. Sounds like you know what you want to accomplish as well, and with yours being the 4th in a series, you’re going to be really focused on what you want to have done by the end of the month. Focus on that and you’ll do just fine! And if you have a chance to get ahead of the daily word count, build as much of a cushion as you can so you can take a few days off if you need to!
