Done!
As of 9:30 p.m. EST last night, I am officially DONE! with my novel. Huzzah!!
Linny Jane and I made the final push to 50,000 together at our favorite local cafe, surrounding ourselves with tea and good music in true writerly fashion.
And now maybe, just maybe, we can get our life back. ;)
Novel? Novel!
I finished my novel at approximately 8:22 p.m.. I have downloaded the certificate of achievement and plan to hang it up . . . somewhere. Sadly, I don't think people at my office will get it.
Word count: 50,082
Huzzah! Now life can return a little bit to normal. Visit
my other page to read more about it.
Labels: novel
Three days
I attempted to post this once, but my cleverly written entry was promptly eaten by cyberspace gremlins.
I am at 27,630 words. I have 22,370 left to go, meaning that I have to write approximately 7460 words a day between now and Friday.
I've been regularly pulling 6000 to 8000 words a day in a desperate effort to catch up, so it's still possible that I'll finish. And I'm going to push as hard as I can to see if I can't make it!!
Four nights left
39,838
I've got this in the bag! If only I didn't need to sleep, life would be fantastic right now.
Last night I was noveling while sitting on my floor, my lap top on my lap (of all places!) and I started falling asleep over it. So I stopped. It wasn't even midnite.
So there's that. Lately in my novel I am living in a cardboard box and making friends with homeless people. I am also digging holes in the backyard.
Drama
I am almost at 25,000. Almost halfway.
Yes, I know time is running out, but let me tell you, I've put on quite the burst of speed. Since I'm almost halfway, it means I especially must finish.
Things are going great. Ideas are coming to me out of the blue, and I like them. For example, there is a car explosion and I burn down my house. There is a pet turtle. This morning I killed my character's mother. It was awful; I was in Starbucks (I know, I know, I don't like them either) and I just decided that she couldn't stay in my story, but it made me really sad and concerned.
I'm getting to the point where I want to be writing four scenes at the same time because I'm afraid I'll forget what I want to happen by the time I get to write it.
Behind (but still trekking on)
As of five minutes ago when I got distracted by the internet, my word count was 7,535. I consider this a major accomplishment, as when I sat down to write about an hour and a half ago, my word count was about 2,000 lower.
That established, if I intend to finish on time, I have to write 2,235 words every day between now and the 30th. Really, it's not so bad. That's only 600 or so more words per day than the average if you stay on target from the beginning. It's only the end of the first full week of NaNo; I've just been getting warmed up.
I was struggling with writer's block for a few days this week (and a nasty bout of "let's find things to do besides write a novel!") when a fantastic piece of advice came across my e-mail. Something that as a usually liner writer, I hadn't even considered:
If you're finding a scene boring to write, cut it and skip to the good part. Set something on fire. Have zombies attack. Note that boring is not the same as hard. Really great scenes can be very hard to write and take a long time, but if you're sitting there going "god, when will this be over," make it be over. You indeed have that power. It's your novel.
I was getting stuck having a couple characters in an extended and rather dull dialogue in a hospital room. I thought that I had to write my way out of this before I could go on. It hadn't even occurred to me that I could leave them hanging in the ICU reception area and move on to another part of the plot progress. Granted, I will at some point have to get my protagonist out of the hospital and into her house, and again out of the house and on a date (with some action in between!), but for now, it's been awesome to give myself the freedom to break out of the expected chronological order and just write what's coming at the time.
I'm hoping to get back on the time-order bandwagon soon, though. I'm getting anxious to know what happens to my characters as their lives unfold, even though I'm artificially manipulating them out of order right now.
Labels: NaNoWriMo
Slow, but not necessarily steady
My word count is somewhere around 3,700 words right now, but I'm not certain. This would be because I, er, took a day off already. Yes, dear readers, in the thralls of a difficult scene that will set the tone for the rest of the novel, I skipped a day of writing yesterday and am already regretting it. I think I'm supposed to be somewhere around 8,330 by this point.
The positive side to all of this is that I am really thinking through my project this year and have a pretty clear idea of what tone and approach I am taking, without needing to experiment as heavily as I did last year in the course of the story. (There were some dreadfully ridiculous and unnecessary scenes written dripping with sarcasm that was not at all in keeping with the rest of the story.) I have an idea how I want to guide the plot while still leaving a lot of room for my characters to surprise me.
Now all that's left to do, I suppose, is to actually
write.
Labels: NaNoWriMo
