Sunday, December 11, 2011

Day #8510 - Minor Victories

I am very proud to announce that today, December 11, 2011 at 6:27 p.m. CST, I FINALLY finished my first draft of my NaNoWriMo novel! I did hit 50,000 words before November 30, so technically I was a "winner," but strictly speaking I wasn't because the goal of that group is to complete a first draft in a novel in a month.

So it took me 41 days instead of 31. Minor details. Let's move on to the part where I get to do a happy dance!

*insert happy dance here*

Originally I gave myself until a week from today (the 18th) to finally finish my first draft. However, during the week I felt myself dragging and I was confused. It wasn't that I didn't know where I wanted my story to go - quite the contrary, I knew exactly where I wanted it to go, I just didn't know how exactly to get it there. So I decided to go back to what I was doing early on in NaNoWriMo and plan out an outline of what was going to happen with my story before I sat down to write it. I've been playing with that for a few days and today I found myself on a roll. I didn't expect to finish the draft today, but I think I mentally needed to. The subject matter and general tone of this story is not nearly as happy (happy's not really the right word, but my vocabulary is failing me right now) as the story I wrote earlier this year, but I think the combination of that heavier tone and the fact that I wrote it so quickly just meant I needed to wrap this draft up so I can step away from it for a while, go back to editing Summer Story (I think that will be my ultra-fun code name for that story), and moving ahead with that (whatever that might mean).

We all on the same page? Okay. Excellent.

So just to recap, I've now written two first drafts of novels in the past 7 MONTHS.

*insert second happy dance here*

Thanks to my friends and family for their amazing support during this crazy journey! Comments always welcome and thanks for everything, blogosphere!

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