I got a little antsy last week. First I’d gone into Camp NaNo word count deficit, then I’d recovered and gotten ahead, but then I took a look at this week’s schedule and went Eek! How was I ever going to write and keep up with all that I’d scheduled? There’s a reason you’re supposed to clear your calendar during NaNo month. So I decided: if I was going to finish my romance novel, I was going to have to do it on Saturday, 23 June 2012. It would entail me writing more hours than I before, and it would entail me fleshing out my story. That was the other problem – I’d pretty much finished my story, but I had thousands of words yet left to write to reach the 50,000 goal.
I had to trust my inner writer, the one I don’t have conscious access to.
And that writer came through. I wrote in several spurts over the day last Saturday with breaks in between. I finished the story and then went back to the beginning to look for plot points or small scenes where the detail could be filled out to add to the story. I didn’t really want to put fluffy filler in (hopefully, I didn’t!). It was painful going, then all of a sudden I realised I was only a couple of hundred words away.
I put all the chapters together in one document and redid the word count.
Oh.
I was now 1,000 words away. Somewhere, I had lost track of my word count and must’ve doubled … um, quadrupled counted.
I was ready to throw in the towel. But I took a break, a nap, a snack, and suddenly my mind was working again, thinking of details that would be good to add.
I had my thousand. Woot!
But wait. I couldn’t celebrate too soon. My word count was just a smidge over 50,000, and Camp NaNo’s word count validator may not agree with WordPerfect’s word count calculator and decide it was a smidge below. Camp NaNoWriMo hadn’t yet opened its word count validator, and so I saved and waited. Then late last night, I realised I’d forgotten to validate! Oops. If I was officially below, that wouldn’t give me much time to get back to romance writing. I quickly copied and pasted the text.
I won!
