Sunday, November 30, 2014

National Novel Writing Month - I finished.



My latest novel manuscript is off to a flying start thanks to National Novel Writing Month. I am 50,963 words in, about halfway through. Really enjoying the story I am writing, although my characters are not. The five of them are in a precarious situation with absolutely no idea what is going on. They have theories, but none of them is close. I am looking forward to springing the big revelation on them.

This was the third time I have done NaNoWriMo, and it was the hardest. There was no novelty thrill. This time I did not reach the 50,000 words until the final day. My long-term illness was up and about for just about the whole month, and the medication I take for it really tires me. The illness also made it uncomfortable to sit for extended periods. I wrote in blocks of 300-500 words and then had a break and did something else for half an hour or so. I wrote well into the evening on most days to pass the daily average of 1667 words.

I did this NaNoWriMo primarily to increase my output and dedication to writing. This it has done. I now spend a lot more time thinking about my writing, often stopping what I am doing to write down notes. This morning I even thought up some ideas while swimming that I had to remember until I finally finished my laps, so I could write them down. I, up until this morning, had been very good at avoiding thinking about writing while swimming for fear of forgetting killer ideas by the time I had finished. 

It will be interesting to see how much I write this month. I have a new article for Divine to write this week which requires a lot of research, and I now have nearly three months of newspapers stacked up to read. Lots of ideas for Divine articles come out of the newspapers, and I believe it is a duty of writers to keep themselves informed, so there is no way I am throwing them out until they have been thoroughly scoured. But while catching up on reading them and writing more articles for Divine, I hope to write at least 15,000 words of my novel this month.


3 comments:

graywave said...

Congratulations! I'm always impressed when anybody makes the NaNoWriMo target - especially since it's something I know I could never do.

Good luck with the rest of the book.

Anthony J. Langford said...

Ditto with graywave. It's very hard work.
Awesome achievement, especially when you had some tired days.

I hope it turns out the way you want in the end. Hopefully Ill see it in print form some day soon.

Graham Clements said...

Thanks Graham and Anthony. I was just looking at all the freebees and discounts for nanowinners. They seem to want me to self-publish.