So far, I’ve written 56,680 words. Which is good, but I’ve only written half of the scenes that I have planned for this novel. Running the numbers, that means that if I keep at the same pace for over-running my estimated length of a scene, the final word count will end up being closer to 100-110k words.

There are three ways I could deal with this. I could go through all of my upcoming scenes and re-estimate the word count I will need based on how long similar scenes have taken so far. This is would take up too much time with such a tight deadline, and it doesn’t bother me if my estimates are off at this stage. I will probably review it in the future, so that my estimates in the future can be more accurate.

A second option would be to ignore the issue completely and just keep writing the same length of scenes. This would give me a rough draft where everything is equal, but the extra 10-20 thousand words would add three to seven extra days of writing, and I want the draft to be finished by the end of november.

Instead, I am going to write the scenes that most interest me to the same level as I have been, while writing the less interesting scenes in a combination of summary and drafting where I might summarize what will take too much time to write out fully. Then, if I decide to cut the scene, I won’t have wasted extra work.