I have just finished reading a forums thread where someone has lost their entire novel in a spectacular computer crash. Talk about major cringe factor! Well, if it happened to me, I would have been majorly pissed. This is why I make backups all the time. Save them to different types of disks (cd, floppy, zip, jump drive). Save in multiple formats. E-mail each draft to yourself (and don't forget to check that the files didn't get corrupted while you sent them!). Upload them to your website if you have one and don't care about publishing. Send a copy to someone else. And print out a hard copy. At least you will still have the paper version if your computer crashes, your disks get erased (or broken), your e-mail eats your inbox, the server crashes, and if for some reason, the Wayback machine forgets you.
This is why I went to the local Kinko's this afternoon to have this year's novel (and my 2002 novel--I realized I never made a hard copy of that one for some reason) printed out. There is no such thing as too many extra backups.
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My advice for reaching 50k: This is my fifth win, so I should hope I know what I'm talking about. After going through the rigors of Nanowrimo for so many years and seeing others go through it as well, there really is only one thing that will guarantee you success at putting down those words--write.
I don't really care what your excuse is. Crowded schedule? People have won Nano through school work, exams, moving house, personal problems, jobs, getting sick, natural disasters (or non-natural disasters), and various other obstacles. Don't say that you've stopped writing because you had to clean your house before your mother-in-law comes to visit. If you want to reach 50k, you'd better make time.
Well, what about writer's block? Work through it. Write a different part of your story first. Write something totally different and tack it onto your word count anyway. Do a writing challenge. The main thing is, don't stop, or writer's block will block you for the rest of the month.
And what about the people complaining that they could hardly write any more because they're writing crap? The problem is--you're rereading your stuff and letting your inner critic get in the way! Don't reread your stuff during November. Save it for later. If you're worried about continuity and consistency--throw that out the window. All of this can be fixed later. And don't tell yourself that you're writing crap. (Have I ever told you that all the threads in the forums about writing crap annoy me to no end?) That is the ultimate defeatist attitude that will bring you down. What you're writing is a first draft. And no first draft is perfect.
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Addendum: Why do most of the published authors participating in NaNo seem to be romance novelists? This is a question asked by Odds-n-Ends who I found through a search that somebody did on this site for published authors. You know, I've noticed this trend as well and I have almost no idea why this is so. Why almost? Well, romance is pretty much the only genre these days in which publishers (particularly publishers of category romance) regularly accept manuscripts under 100k. This doesn't mean that authors in other genres are dissing Nano (oh, on the contrary--Neil Gaiman thinks it's a great idea). More likely, Nano just doesn't fit with their own goals.
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Novel Stats
Word count Total word count: 74725 (according to Nano validator) 50,000th word: poured Last word: necessary Word count did not include author byline, chapter titles, the quoted poem by Lucille Clifton, section markings, or the words "The End."
Number of pages In 10pt Times New Roman, default margins, single spaced: 97 In 12pt Courier New, 1 inch margins, double spaced: 341
