Three-quarters of the way through the race, he dropped to the side of the trail, panting, uncertain which path to take next — or whether even to try.

I logged four words toward my National Novel Writing Month title today, earning me another badge for writing 21 days straight toward the project. The next two badges — one for 40,000 words and one for crossing the finish line at 50,000 — already show on my profile because of a typo I made somewhere around 20,000 that added an extra zero. I corrected that — my current count is 31,822 words — but a software glitch won’t take back the awards.

So, with about two-thirds of the words completed in three-quarters of the time allotted, I’m falling behind pace and it’s time to reassess whether it’s time to drop out of this year’s race. I do have a life to live, after all.

The story I’m working on, “He Said, She Said,” covers a 40-year friendship of two young journalists who meet in the 1970s. It follows their careers through four decades of political, historical, societal and technological changes, all played out against additional changes in the news industry.

It’s clear that a story of that scope isn’t going to be told in 50,000 words, so I’m planning to break it up into sections. Yesterday I reached a point where the first section could be considered complete, or could go on for a few more chapters. So today I started the next section with these four words:

“And then what happened?”