On not winning Nanowrimo

I have written 26,241 words of a novel this month.  In order to "win", I have to get to 50,000 by midnight on Wednesday, a pace of nearly 4,000 words per day.  This is most likely not possible because in the next six days I have commitments with family and friends and my job, so I most likely will not win.  Except that I'll have written 30,000 words that I wouldn't have written otherwise, and found a story I didn't know I had.

The nanowrimo website has a little graphic showing you how many words you wrote each day, and that graphic is highly informative in my case.  The daily goal for nanowrimo is 1,667 words.  There were days I wrote 3,000 or 4,000 words.  There were days I wrote 1,000 or 2,000 words.  There were days - stretches of them, five or ten in a row - in which I wrote 0 words, and those days were what got me behind.  I would look at my goal up to that point - 26667 words for example - and my progress - say 18741 - and I would see a gulf too big to be crossed, and I wouldn't pick up the (metaphorical) pen.  And then the next day the goal would be 28333 words and my progress would still be 18741, and the gulf would be even bigger.

Writing 1667 words a day can be tough.  I can do it in an hour if I put my mind to it, but I don't always have an hour, especially an hour when I'm wide awake and undistracted.  But 500 words a day is easier, it would only take 15 or 20 minutes and they might be higher-quality words.  If I did that every day, I'd get 15,000 words a month - about half what I'll probably do in November - and I could write a novel in a year.