nano-done-o :::
It’s just after midnight and NaNoWriMo 2008 is over! It’s been a hell of a month and a brilliant experience, and I’m very proud of my achievement. I wrote a total of 33685 words, and tonight I managed to complete my story, paraphrasing the ending a little but plotting out how all the bits come together. I knew yesterday there was no chance of reaching the official target but I feel fine about it. No failure here!
Looking back, however, it’s easy to see now that I would have easily reached 50000 words if I’d been just a bit more disciplined early in the month. I regularly averaged 2500 words per hour when I put my head down, but just as I’d figured that out and got more serious about the challenge I fell ill for two days and had to spend all my time catching up with work stuff. I’d also planned to write on my holiday to Brighton this week – the novel is set there, so it made sense – but was having such a lovely time meeting Twitter people and catching up with other friends there was little time left for anything but sleep, though I did soak up enough scraps of information and ideas for characters and subplots that my writing session with Viv on Friday was extremely fruitful.
Isn’t it amazing what people will do to procrastinate, though? Even tonight I was spending time on semi-related things that were not increasing my word count, like this:
Right now I’m happy it’s over – all the extra time I used to hammer out floods of words will come in handy for a few other projects I have up my sleeve for the end of the year and my house could do with a damn good clean after a month of neglect. Setting aside all this extra time to be creative has made me be very productive in other areas, as I’ve already written, and it’s been quite humbling to realise that crafting a story over such a large amount of words is actually really difficult, though I now know it’s something I want to work hard to get good at.
So what’s next? A break from the laptop, I think, and some rest for my fatigued little fingers. Not much though – I start my two week stint as Guest Editor for Dollymix tomorrow! I didn’t see anything in the guidelines about writing 50,000 words, though…
Welldone! Wow! I meant to do it this year but making the time and putting everything else on hold just never came together. Next year!
congrats! i managed to get over the 50k mark, just about, got another few thousand done last night and probably finish off the thing tonight, loved every minute of it and going to get it online soon!
i’d be more than willing to read what you wrote if you are looking for people to have a gander, i’m always eager to have a look over my contemporaries work
Thanks guys!
Richard, when I say it’s a pile of mush I really mean it…I’m going to have a read through towards the end of December and use miserable January to start attempting a rewrite. I’d love you to see it after that