Monday, December 5, 2011

I'd like the feeling in my bum back, please...

It's been five days after the end of NaNoWriMo, and I think I'm just now recovering. It sure was one exciting month.

There were really two goals I was aiming for: 80k words and finishing the actual story line. I didn't make the second one. There are still three chapters at the end of my plot line that are only outline stubs. I hope to fix that in the coming weeks.

But the first one, I definitely made that goal.

On the last day, I managed to set a new personal record for how many words I have written in a day, at 18,216. That was done at the fabulous write-in at Dunn Bros coffee house in Eden Prairie. It was a LOT of sitting still while drinking caffeine, and having word wars every half hour, and writing straight for about six hours without stopping. In the craziness of it, I didn't bother to switch scenes at all. My characters ended up in a subterranean secret labyrinth navigating their way through using an audio-guided tour that says things like "This tunnel was dug in 1872 just before the Steamclot mining company went bankrupt. Please move to the left to avoid being impaled."
I also made up a mythical creature and put it in the labyrinth, because all labyrinths should have some kind of mythical creature stalking them, right?

Though it gets wacky at times, I am so happy about my book. And proud that I pushed myself this year to go above and beyond what I thought I could do.

My final word count? 102,173!

Thank you to everyone who has cheered me on, supported me this past month while I let things like housekeeping and phone calls slip away from me. This was very important to me and you all got that. I thank you very much for the freedom to do what I love to do with complete abandon one month out of the year. It's not everyone who gets to do that, and YOU made it possible!

Congratulations to all NaNoWriMo participants and winners! Remember, if you didn't make the word count you were hoping for, at least you wrote more words because of NaNo than you otherwise would have written, and that makes you awesome. :)

No comments:

Post a Comment