It’s been one week down so far in my NaNoWriMo journey.

I didn’t do as well as I could have. I started off relatively strong, writing the necessary 1500-or-so words a day. But I had a biology test on Friday, so I slacked off on Thursday and Friday.

Current word count? Approximately 8,500 words.

I have around 7600 words and 24 pages on a word document currently sitting on my laptop. I have another 900 or so sitting in a Google Doc waiting to be added.

The biggest difficulty of the first week was attempting to choose a plot line. I had several ideas I wanted to run with. I wanted to write a story about Alexander Hamilton’s mistress. I wanted to write a story loosely inspired by the Purim story. I wanted to follow through with so many ideas but couldn’t choose one. 

The amount of research that would need to go into the mistress story concerned me, as there isn’t a large wealth of information on the Internet regarding Hamilton’s mistress. Not to mention that I don’t really have the means to travel to the Library of Congress to get ahold of his letters.

I decided to work with the Purim Story. It’s a story idea I’ve been wanting to tackle for a few years now. Purim is the story of how a young Jewish girl marries a Persian King without his knowledge of her being a Jew. Bonus: a bunch of fun and dramatic things happen along the way.

I want to modernize the story. My characters have names, with my ‘king’ being of Hispanic origin and my ‘Esther’ being of Jewish origin.

Other vital characters central to the story’s plot still make their appearances, and I have so far made this story work up to 8,500 words with a modern point of view.

It’s currently split into three parts, with each one focusing on different time-jumps throughout the relationship. In each part, I have a relatively rough timeline worked out, and my 8,500 words consist of unfinished scenes waiting to be extended.

So who knows, at the moment it seems there may be hope that I will achieve 50,000 words by the end of the month. Sure, I’m a little behind on my weekly goal, but I can use Veteran’s Day to play catch up.

For now, I hope that this is the case.

8,500/50,000

Until then.

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