NaNo WriMo Update

We're officially halfway through National Novel Writing Month, and this week I made it to the magical 25,000 word mark. Basically, that means I've been playing with Hello Kitty markers and pencils and ribbons for the past couple of days :). By next Saturday, I should be hitting the next goal of 37,500, which sounds ridiculously close to the end!

So, how do I feel about my novel so far? Truthfully, I think there are some good parts, but they are few and far between. In the first 25,000 words of my zombie apocalypse novel, there has yet to be a single zombie. This could be a problem. Well, actually, that's not entirely true. I wrote a pack of zombies into the prologue. Yay! I had almost forgotten about that. But the time has come where I need to start writing them into the main story. To explain where they came from and how they started killing people.

In the end, I know that my novel cannot be finished at only 50,000 words. 50k is still my goal by the end of November, but the entire novel needs to be more like 65-75,000 words. I am praying that by the time I get those 75k words written, I will like my novel a lot more than I like it now. Is it normal to be less than thrilled about an early first draft? The story is good, I know that. But now I'm afraid it's too cliche or overdone. I'm committed to this story though, and I must press on. All I can hope is that somewhere in the next 12k words or so, I start to really love the way I'm writing it.