Contemplating a NaNoWriMo “Cheat”

Here’s the thing:

NaNoWriMo is all about writing a 50K first draft of a novel from scratch. On my current project, I have a previous (NaNoWriMo) exploratory draft, which I am not revising, but completely re-writing from scratch. I have written about 2000 words in this thing, and am contemplating about 98,000 more.

So, if I mark previously written stuff in this new draft (as well as the exploratory draft) “do not include” so that it doesn’t affect my word count, am I justified in using this project for NaNoWriMo?

Of course, there is no NaNoWriMo Police Dept., so I can do as I damn well please. But — the very fact that it bothers me enough to write this post means the NNWMPD is alive and well and living… in my head.

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