NaNoWriMo

NaNoWriMo.....National Novel Writing Month. It's a yearly challenge where writers of all ages, all over the country, collectively sit down at their laptops and start putting words to paper. New stories, stories that have been started but never finished, ideas that have been bouncing around inside their heads for years.....The goal is to write 50,000 words by he end of November. That works out to be about1667 words per day.  Doesn't seem like a lot at first. Sometime you just hit the ground running with a great idea and 1667 words just seem to come pouring out. I wrote for a whopping 5 days. My total word count? 3000. The story has a great start. An ok secondary storyline. The two storylines intermingle a bit here and there and then converge toward the end. Sounds great. But I have this timeline in my head. Like, the amount of time over which this story should take place. And I have a 2 week gap right smack in the middle that I don't know what to do with. No clue. Totally idea-less. So here it sit, now the 15th of November, with my head figuratively up against a brick wall.  I haven't added a single word to my count in about 10 days.  And yet, here I am typing away on my blog with hardly any effort at all. So, does writing about my writing here on my blog count towards word count? I have a journal where I type up ideas about the storyline. Do those words count? Because technically I AM working on the story.  I have almost twice as many words in that journal as I do in the actual story. 
I had another idea though. I'm pretty good at writing little short stories from writing prompts I find online. What if I find a new writing prompt every day and just write a 1667 word short story? I honestly think that would be easier for me than trying to push a story through a 2 week timeframe that, right now, it obviously does not want to go thru. Yes, I'm speaking about the story as if it makes decisions and speaks for itself - because it does. Any writer will tell you that their stories start off as their own ideas, but tend to end up having a life of their own and sometimes can have twists and turns that the author never anticipated. What do you think? I'm going to give it a go, starting tonight. And I'll let you know how it goes.