Hey, SE Readers. Joan with you today with the third in my Lessons from NaNo series. To read the first part, click here. You can access part two by clicking this link.

Today’s post is the shortest of the series, but probably the most important if you want to reach your word count goal. Perseverance.

In order to get off to a good start, I took a day of vacation on November 1. I wrote over 3000 words for the first two days. After that, my daily word count decreased. A few days, I exceeded 2000, but most were under that mark. My lowest day before reaching the 50K mark was 305.

Because I’m a visual person, I modified my word count spreadsheet a bit for NaNo. I love using Excel, so I applied simple conditional formatting to keep me on track. Here’s a screenshot:

Green = goal…