I’m not finished with the novel. In fact, I figured that 50,000 words would be about half of the total novel. But I have a good, solid start on it. I will need to shift much of my attention over to the final edits to the first novel so I can publish it, not to mention a Christmas Ghost story that must be ready to read in just three weeks (eeek!).

But right now, I’m very happy with how much I’ve written and how far the first draft of the third novel in this series has moved. Yay!

This is the first time I’ve used Scrivener’s Project Targets widget. It’s very cool. You set the word count target for the entire project, and Scrivener keeps track of it in the top bar. When you only have a few words written, the bar is red. As the bar grows, it changes to orange, then yellow, then yellow-green, turning a darker and darker green until you reach the goal. The lower bar is for shorter term goals you set. You can reset that bar any time you like, except that it always resets at midnight. Which works nicely with National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), since writing every day and trying to average 1667 word a day is the goal.

I tweeted screenshots of my project targets over the course of the month, so here’s one of the earliest ones, when the upper bar representing the whole month was still in the red, and that particular day I was just getting into the orange.

November isn’t quite over, yet, and I haven’t reached the end of the novel, so I plan one continuing to work on this for a another day before I switch to the Christmas ghost story.

I also need to post an update on my yearly goals. I haven’t since early October, because everything was focused on NaNoWriMo this month. But I have not forgotten them!

Right now, I’m feeling very happy about the writing.