I should be at 25000 words by now, but am a bit more than 10000 words behind. I think I’ve been this far behind before and managed to make it up in the second half, so we’ll see how it goes. General thoughts:

-Dictation continues to be a not-so-good choice for me for NaNoWriMo. The rest of the year, I use it mostly when I am burned out and fed up with what I’m working on. It’s more mental work for me to get my thoughts in order before I speak them than to type quickly and backspace through anything I change my mind about, and the amount of tweaking needed to turn the dictation results into some kind of sense largely erases the speed advantage.

-Working on multiple projects in NaNoWriMo, also not a great choice for me. I’ve gotten maybe 499 words on Thorn Master, and 1000ish on Star Master Book 2, only just started on Star Master Book 3 in the past couple of days. I tend to write my way slowly and meditatively through the second half (and missing scenes) of a long, complicated first draft. So, although mentally I probably needed to get the Book 2 stuff out of the way, doing that first definitely slowed me down.

-Anyway, feel free to learn from my mistakes here.