complete NaNoWriMo 2007

FAIL.

... or “failed again.”

What a ride. I’m glad I did it, even though it was close at the end – I had to write about 20k words in one week. I learned to let go (mostly) of my internal editor and just write, which is a very good thing because I always find editing easier than the initial creative process. I also ended up with something that is not completely garbage, which raises my hopes that someday I might even actually publish something.

And finally, a learned that while I like to read Fantasy, I don’t really know enough about many of the elements I wanted to include to allow suspension of disbelief (e.g. horses.) Sci-Fi is probably a better genre for me to write. But it was probably for the best to write Fantasy in my first attempt, so I could really let go and just write. I actually know something about Science, so I would have been way too perfectionistic in writing Sci-Fi.

I don’t know if I’ll do NaNo again next year; if all goes well, I may actually try to write another novel on my own, before next November. I’m not sure at this point whether I’m going to try to clean up my NaNo novel, but who knows, I might. But not till January, at least!

Congrats to all the NaNoers who tried, regardless of whether they reached 50k or not. It’s a big feat even to get started!

Congratulations to all – please, let’s look for each other again for 2008!

Time to go drink some champagne! More thoughts tomorrow.

And since I was at work until 10pm last night (except for the hour I took off for dinner), I feel justified in leaving work an hour early today.

A little over 9 hours to go, and 5k words to write. It’s gonna be close.

We absolutely rock! Go, writers, go! Congratulations to all – we are a darned high-quality team. And for those of you who wondered, Our Heroine made it to the capital city in time for the electrical storm to fuel her spell to form the shield to break the aliens’ evil mind-ray. film at 11.

Cheercheercheercheer to everyone!

And two more days to go. I did 4k today, the same should be do-able for the next two days. I am still really worried that I may get sucked into bringing work home tomorrow night. At least I have the prospect of possibly coming home early on Friday for the final stretch!

ta-da!!!

Of course, only approx 5k of that is usable – I kept changing people’s alibis as I went along and making note to go back and change it, so there is A LOT of revision and A LOT of sub-plot loaded paragraphs which need to be scrapped completely yadayadayada -

who gives a flying fig when we’re finishing nanowrimo!!

The Count can rest in peace now that justice has finally been done!

I just got to 40,763 words and realized that I’m only actually about halfway through my story, and that the story is going to go a completely different way than I thought (of course, I didn’t know then how the story was going to end but I do now.) I’ll just have to paint the rest of the story with a broad brush to reach 50k and then I can flesh it out in revision.