My NaNoWriMo, which was already dreadfully behind, has been put on hold until I take the GRE on Monday.
Did I mention I was taking the GRE on Monday?
Proceed to freak out on my behalf.
(Probably will not be winning NaNo this year, which is rubbish. I know it’s just an easy excuse, but NaNo always falls on the worst month.)
So in my usual habit of playing with progress tracking rather than actually making progress, I made a tracking spreadsheet for NaNoWriMo that helps keep track of your daily writing and lets you know if you’re on track or not. The usual goal is 1667 words per day, but that’s only if you actually get to sit down and conquer that goal every day. If you skip a day, or if you’re a little short one day, the spreadsheet will redistribute your remaining wordcount over the remaining days of the month, which helps you to compensate much better than having to make up those lost 1667 words the very next day.
Here it is as an xls file: NaNo Progress Chart
If you don’t have Excel, you can upload it to Google Docs and use it from there, which is where I made it to begin with. You only need to update your overall wordcount (the white column) for each day, and the spreadsheet will do the rest. Your “daily quota” is how much you can expect to have to write every day for the rest of the month in order to reach 50,000 words, dependent on how much you’ve written so far. The “words to go” is how much more you’ll need to write on a given day in order to keep a quota consistent, but if you stop short of your “words to go,” the next day’s daily quota (with the red circle) is your new goal for every day of writing.
So if you miss a day, or are short for a day, it will help you plan how to get to 50,000 words anyway, rather than reminding you how dreadfully far behind you are. 
\o/
So I’m back from y-con, have been since Tuesday morning (despite Monday trying to ruin everything), just haven’t popped over here to say so. My y-con post is coming soon, with pictures! Other than that, NaNoWriMo starts IN AN HOUR but I won’t be doing anything about that until tomorrow night. This month is going to be insane for me and I’m really irritated and frustrated over it, but . . . let’s see how it goes.
To recap, there’s NaNo, GRE’s to take on the 19th, and four applications to fill out for grad schools, including writing samples I don’t have. I also need to prep my profs with stuff for their recommendations, and probably some other huge thing I’m forgetting. Oh, transcripts. Yes.
Gonna be fun.