I’ve won NaNoWriMo 2025! And I’ve finished the first draft of The Soul’s Turning, the third and final book in The Q’Zam’Ta Trilogy!!
I’d planned on finishing National Novel Writing Month 2025 on Sunday, 30 November, but I woke up this morning unhappy and irritated at the thought of writing one more day. I want to finish today, yelled my inner toddler. Okay, okay, but…
Then my imagination kicked into gear during SMR/Beta audiovisual entrainment with left yellow and right magenta LED eyeset lights. I not only began to recall the outline for today, I began to write tomorrow’s planned chapter. What to do? I’ve been increasingly tired this week after each chapter’s writing session. My chapters have shrunk in word count, and I totally forgot one character.
Seriously!
Just too much to keep track of in this complex, challenging, fun novel!!
Finishing Time
I began a list of details, events, characters that I need to either put in or continue on from when I had put them in. I added to that list last night, and I almost felt like throwing up from the fatigue. I guess that’s why my inner voice demanded an end, right now.
I buzzed my large strong mocha into a froth. Placed it on my stone coaster that declares “one can never creep when one feels the impulse to soar” and began writing the chapter before the penultimate one.
I told myself that if I finished in less than an hour, I’d write the penultimate chapter. I didn’t quite make it, but on my walk, the penultimate chapter’s words pushed themselves into my consciousness as I fought the westerly wind and pumped my arms to keep warm.
Home. Laptop open. Fingers on keyboard. Typed up a storm. A short chapter it was. Finished in less than an hour easily.
Take a break, I instructed myself. Only one more task to do: revise the final chapter to ensure it flows out of the rest of the book. As you may (or may not) recall, I wrote the last chapter on November 1st, the first day of NaNoWriMo. I opened Bluesky, loaded up NaNo2.0’s word sprints account, and used it to revise, with breaks, the last two chapters. Last two because some of what I’d written on November 1st belonged in the penultimate chapter.
At 3:13 PM, I finished the novel and won NaNoWriMo!
I announced my achievement and relief six minutes later.
What’s next?
Bec and Chris’s 7-Day Writing Sprint launches on Monday, the first day of December. I want to use the first day to review revision tasks; then use the rest of the sprint to start revising it. I want 2026 to be less hectic publishing wise than 2025 is. I’ve been losing my mind trying to keep all the novels I was marketing, publishing, planning, and writing straight in my head these last 12 months, and I am so ready to never do that again!!
So I need to start revising this year to ensure I can spread out editorial and beta reading critiques and publishing in a reasonable schedule. One hopes, anyway. Good plans and all.
