NaNoWriMo lied to me.
When I first started writing 50,000 words was my end goal. After all, that’s what NaNo said was required for a book, and a non-profit writing competition wouldn’t lie to me, right?
Mind you, 50k might as well have been a million for all my ability to write that much. Twenty, sometimes thirty, thousand was about the height of my ability. But 50 seemed plausible, if I stretched.
Unfortunately for short-winded me, I learned that 50k was considered underachieving, unless what you wanted to achieve was a novella. All the cool kids write to 75-95k nowadays, and novellas don’t have a particularly impressive hard copy market.
Feeling overwhelmed, as I often do when I try to look to far ahead in my writing career, I did some research and asked around for advice. Here’s what I came up with:

It turns out that there aren’t a lot of ‘filler’ bits you can add to a story without making it bloated and ridiculous, so obvious my best bet is to figure out how to make the interesting bits take longer.  Do you guys have any recommendations?  How do you meet the new, improved length requirements? And for those of you that constantly write 20 or 30k more words than is required, how do you do it?

P.S.  My manuscript is at 55,561!