A Work in Progress

Final word count: 60,035
Average words per day: 2,001

What can I say? It was a great NaNoWriMo year!

I probably would not have believed it on November 1^st, but this turned into a 60,000-word year. Somehow, I went from concern over whether the plot concept could support a novel-length story to a tale where there’s still more to tell.

All told, I’m pretty pleased with how the story came out, how the backstories of the characters played out . . . and got some surprises from the dark mysteries of their pasts. I still need to work of them out, but that’s a task for another time.

Beyond the valuable exercise of doing NaNoWriMo itself, this was a terrific experience in giving me an opportunity to get to really know my characters. It was the first story that I had done with them that provided me with a reasonable framework in which to explore their pasts and how they came to be together. This will be invaluable when I go back and start the series from the beginning.

I’ll close with this:

Top 5 Things That Will Happen During NaNoWriMo

1. You will get sick in some mildly miserable way.
   It will not be enough to completely knock you down, but sufficient that when you later read what you wrote during that period, you wonder just what they put in those cold medications.
2. The cat will go into heat.
   There’s nothing like having your car wandering the house, howling at the top of its feline lungs, while you’re trying to commune with your muse and form words and sentences.
3. Your friend/family member’s computer will suffer a catastrophic failure.
   Because you’re trying to squeeze your writing into every spare minute after work and between other commitments, someone in your life will suddenly need large chunks of your time because November is when their computer decided to suffer digital seizures.
4. You will suddenly have a life.
   Although you might not have much of a social life, come November, suddenly you will receive invitations to parties, dinner, and other events from people you have rarely spoken with in months. (Maybe this is prompted by your Facebook/Twitter/Google+ post on November 1^st, “Are you ready to NaNoWriMo?”? I don’t know.)
5. Your day job will suddenly demand additional attention.
   I think this might be related to NaNoWriMo being in November, close to the year-end for many businesses, but it seems as though some kind of departmental reorganization. sweeping budget changes, or new project processes all seem to poke their heads up just when you need to try to steal extra time for writing.