"A winner?" you may ask, "What did you win?!"
I won the right to say I wrote over 50,000 words of a novel during the thirty days of November! I can hardly believe it either. This past month was a contest against time, against story ideas, against perfection, and against exhaustion. Can you believe I actually hit the 50K goal mark on day twenty-two, and finished on the 30th at 67,011 words?? 🥳
As I mentioned in October's blog "Good News, Crazy News", I had three specific goals in mind during my participation in National Novel Writing Month. How did I do?
I wanted to force myself to plan and outline an entire story before beginning it—and I DID, even though the story inevitably took on a life of its own.
I wanted to force myself to NOT go back and edit until I'd completed the novel—and I MOSTLY did. 😆 The writer-perfectionist in me was terrified, and kept repeating: "If I don't fix this ONE thing right now, I will never remember or find it later and this book will be a complete failure." So, yes, technically I did some minor editing, but nothing too time-consuming.
I wanted to write well, despite the mad-dash writing inherent to participation in NaNoWriMo—and I think I did pretty well! I tried not to use too many word-quadrupling tricks, like over-describing mundane actions, but I DID refuse to hyphenate a few words and phrases that really should have been hyphenated (So, I should probably subtract about 56 words from the final word count🙃).
Along the way, I learned a few things about my NaNoWriMo book, The Science of Stars. It will be a YA book (based on the main character's age) and has a quirky little mystery built into it now. What I still don't know about it: who the final romantic interest will be or how it will ultimately end.
So, did I finish writing a book in one month? Unfortunately, no. I think there's still about 30% of the story left to write in this first draft, but I won't know for sure until I actually finish it—which won't be until the spring of next year.
WHY? Because I need to polish off the final fable in The Fable Triad first! Yes, The Mermaid and the River Otter will be available for you to purchase—very soon. 🤩
