Last month kinda flew by! One minute, I was struggling to hit 30k words, the next I had hit 50k and was marching onward toward 70!
That’s right, final word count as of November 30th: 71,207
BUT: the story isn’t done yet! I worked on it a little on Sunday morning and broke 72k, but I think I may need a little time to figure out how to end it. I still want to end it the way I had originally planned, but I just need to work out how to put that idea down into words.
How’d it come out?
Toward the end there, quite a bit of the story came together pretty well. I feel like the climax was a little lackluster and not quite as shocking or inevitable as it sounded when I came up with it, but I’m ok with it, for now.
The future of this one does not look very bright. While I loved last year’s Nano project and still plan on editing it into submission-ready form, I’m not sure about this one. I am terribly proud of myself for having beating my personal best Nano word count this year – which I’m still having trouble figuring out how I did it – but the story didn’t turn out how I expected. I feel like the first half of it or so ought to go into an appendix or two, and what’s left is the only “real” part of the story. Maybe a few months from now, I’ll think about working on it again, but for now, I’d like to wrap it up, put a pin in it, and forget about it for a while.
What did I get out of it?
One thing, and I know I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: write-ins are awesome. Meeting new people has never been easy for me, but finding a group of people who are just as crazy (in a good way!), just as dedicated, just as nerdy, and just as interested in putting pen to paper or fingers to keyboard as I am has been awesome. Writing is lonely work at times, and having someone to share in it, even if it means sitting silently at a keyboard across a table from each other, is a wonderful thing to have.
Also, I write pretty damn fast! I sort of knew this already, not only because I have won Nano for the past four years, but also because I know I can crank out five to ten thousand words in a day pretty easily given the right motivation or being in a good groove. However, I discovered just how fast I really write: I hit up several write-ins during the month with only thirty or forty minutes left in the allotted time block and was able to get about a thousand words out each time. I never knew I could write that much so quickly!
I had never thought about my writing time in terms of hours or minutes – I had always calculated it by a “day’s work”. Now that I have a better idea of what I’m capable of, I’m optimistic about planning out future projects.
Post-Nano Plans
- EDITING. I am really looking forward to getting back into my edit-in-progress that I put on hold to do Nano. I shouldn’t say that – I’m not really looking forward to it because I really want to edit again, I’m just looking forward to it because it’s a change of pace after a hard-fought month of writing.
- UNOFFICIAL WRITE-INS. The good news is that some of the wrimos in the area are talking about doing a weekly write-in throughout the year amongst ourselves, meaning if I have a set weekly time block in which to edit, I may actually get some shit done.
I think that was my biggest problem with the editing dragging on before I started Nano this year–I had little accountability to anyone, so I lacked enough motivation to keep on top of it at a reasonable pace. While a week after Nano may be too soon to hope for another unofficial, more informal write-in group to get going, I’m gonna go ahead and hope anyway – because I love meeting up with these people, and because I do need that kick in the pants to get back into editing mode again!
I have been sort of itching to work on editing last year’s Nano project instead of this other edit-in-progress I have been working on, but I am not sure I’m up to taking on two projects at once. The original one is likely to get procrastinated or put on the back burner permanently.
In unrelated time-sucks
No movies out this week I especially want to see, but I kind would like to make some time to see The Book Thief – read the book a few years ago and LOVED it – and then the new Hobbit flick comes out next week!
Also, my blogging has fallen dreadfully far behind, again, on all three of the big ones I write (I guess it’s not too bad on this one, so maybe I should only say two of them), so it’d be nice to be able to get back into those again for a while. On the other hand, it was sort of nice having a break from them for a while, so maybe I will need to retool my posting schedule again and figure out how much time I really want to invest in them in the coming months.
And… I just put the Christmas tree up last night, with the ornaments to follow later today! I was totally out of it last December and didn’t put the tree up at all, but this year, I am really looking forward to the holiday. It’s going to be pretty quiet, not a lot of people or presents or fanfare, but I’m hoping to do some cookies and my usual holiday film line-up, at the least, and if I’m feeling up to it, I may check out some local festivities.
TGIO! Happy December!
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