NANO REPORT
I'm not sure how many words I ended up with. I lost count the last week or so.

My feeling is, and always has been, that quality is much more important than quantity, and I don't see the value in piling up a lot of words in a word count that are going to have to be tossed out later.

But I'm further along in my novel than I would have been without the push. I'd really gotten stalled out on my writing. And for snapping a restart, I recommend trying NaNoWriMo, even though November has to be one of the crappiest months to try it in. It was obviously designed by a man who doesn't have to worry about Thanksgiving dinners or dropping housecleaning tasks the month before Christmas (eek!). I'd prefer a nice quiet month like February. Still, there are dangers in trying to work too fast, even in a restart. And now I'm finding that much of the detail work that makes my stories fun to write (and I hope fun to read) is missing. I'm going back now and trying to layer it in, and that's not the way I normally work.

I did find out the root cause of my stall-out, which was basically a mismatch in my geography between the physical map I have drawn and the map I carry in my mind. I tried compromising, but as soon as I started writing again, the mental map superseded the paper one.