Phew! National Novel Writing Month — NaNoWriMo — is over! As I write this, many around the world are doing word sprints with some of the NaNo team to beat the deadline of writing 50,000 words in the month of November. Not me though! (Gloat)
Last year, I finished my first novel She on the last day; I had reached the 50k mark a few days earlier. She came out to about 75,000 words, if memory serves me right. This year I finished 2 days early, on Sunday! But I didn’t even make the 60k mark, the minimum word count for an acceptable-sized novel. At an official 58,072 words, it actually doesn’t have that many more words than Lifeliner did when I wrote that book back in 2006. Sigh.
I struggled to get Lifeliner up to a decent word size during the editing phase. I’m not so sure I’ll be as successful with this one, for when I was done, I was done! I had nothing more to say. I even wondered if I’d stretched it out too much.
But you know, writing (for me anyway) is all about being happy with your work for a nanosecond and the rest of the time worrying: can I start? No, I’m not ready! My outline sucks. I don’t have enough energy, there’s no way. This sucks. I want to sleeeeeep, why can’t I sleeeeeep? What does this mean anyway? Is it in English? Oh my god, I need to stop. I can’t continue, it’s all too like pulling cod out of the Atlantic. Holy cow, I’m 3 chapters from the end. Maybe I can finish! I’m done! Woot!! How am I going to revise? Worse, how will I add in (Ack!) 30,000 more words?! Can’t be done. No way. I need chocolate.
I think I’ll go back to that Woot! part and stretch that nanosecond out to two.
Thank you to all the wonderful people on Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, and “real life” who encouraged me on. And thank you most of all to the NaNo folks who dreamt up this imaginative event and made it possible to get butt in chair and once more write fiction.
