Writing a book, part 4 | I conquered NaNoWriMo!

Have you heard the news??

I wrote over 50,000 words of a novel in the month of November!

That’s right, I won NaNoWriMo! Not only that, but I hit 50k three days early (which has never happened before) and wrote over 5k more before the end of the month. Plus, I managed to hit my goal of writing on every single day of the month. This may be my fourth time winning NaNoWriMo, but this is the best victory I’ve had so far!

On Tuesday, the day I hit 50k words, I had about 2k left to write and less than two hours to do it. I wrote for a while, getting the remaining words down to 1k, but I had a 2 hour class coming up in a half hour. The logical thing would be to stop writing  and leave the last thousand words for after class, right? But no. I ended up writing a thousand words in twenty minutes, finishing NaNoWriMo, and still got to class on time.

And yes, I ended up writing over 4k on the last day, even though I didn’t have to. But plot things were happening and I didn’t want to stop! And I was listening to the Lord of the Rings score and getting really into it, as one inevitably does while listening to the Lord of the Rings score, so that kept me going.

What’s next?

You might be saying, wow Margaret, that’s so cool that you have a draft of a full novel!

Hah. Nope. This novel is going to end up being well over 55k words. I’d estimate that I’m a little over halfway through at this point, which means I have a lot more work to do just to finish the first draft. And then a ton more work after that because this draft is already a mess. But that’s okay. I’m quite attached to this story and these characters, so I don’t mind sticking with them for a while longer.

I’d like to finish this draft by the end of 2018, but that’s not going to happen, what with finals gradually taking over my life and the holidays right after that. So my plan is to finish this draft by the end of January 2019, and then start revising from there!

This month has been anything but easy, writing on top of being a full time student and trying to finish of my last semester of college. But working on this novel has been a bright spot in a month of stress and misery. True, some of that stress came from writing the novel, but it was all worth it in those moments when I sat down and the words came easily and the characters came alive. NaNoWriMo may have been tough, but I’m so proud of what I was able to accomplish this month!

The sentence that got me to 50k (with no context): “Tears squeeze from the corners of his eyes and sweat springs to his forehead.”

Writing music: Aside from the complete score of Lord of the Rings? I’ve been having some feelings about “The Call” by Regina Spektor. Maybe it’s cheating to use a song from a portal fantasy movie for my portal fantasy novel, but whatever, it fits.

And finally, a meme for my son, aka one of my main characters, Anson:

Did you participate in NaNoWriMo? How did the end of the month go for you?

x Margaret
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