The faithless can bite their tongues. Betty had her cushy cable-watching job today, and by the time her client called for assistance, the wordcount was 1,040. True, this should have been achieved by about 2pm on the first of November, but it’s really not that big a deal: delaying like this merely bumps the daily word target up to 2,500. It is perfectly possible to crack out 5,000 on a good day, if you find a cafe with a power-socket. The NaNo founder advocates what are technically called “nuclear weekends”, which involve three sessions a day, forty minutes on, twenty off, until you hit 1,500; this gives you almost 10k in only two days. At that rate, I could finish NaNo with ten days to spare. But we shall see.

By noon, Betty’s wordcount was 1,553. The first day’s official target, 1,667 words, was reached at 12.20 precisely. By 9.30pm, it was 2,800 words. Nothing to worry about.