This past week has been a lot of firsts for me...

First flat tire
First time eating at Five Guys restaurant (most awesome burger place ever!)
First time seeing Muppets Christmas Carol
First time editing a first draft from a printed version

I've had first drafts before. I can thank five years of doing NaNoWriMo for that. But this is the draft that has gone further than all other drafts, and so I feel it's a new level of editing for me. It's also the largest first draft I've ever written, which makes the task that much more exciting and daunting.

I outlined this novel for a long time and planned out every process of how I was going to write it. And the planning worked well. But now I'm realizing I have not planned out a single bit of how I'm going to go about making it better.

After doing some research online and listening to some friends' advice, here's my battle plan:

1. Read through casually without making any editing marks, but take notes on my most common mistakes.
2. Come up with a way to remedy those mistakes and write the second draft focusing only on those.

Do any of my readers have experience with editing first drafts? Got any advice for me?

I'll let you know how it goes. Also, even though some people might argue that editing manuscripts is the same on a computer screen as it is on the printed page, if nothing else having my entire novel printed out somehow seems empowering. The words are there, unchangeable. My story is now permanent. Looking at printed pages also enables me to make notes with fancy calligraphy pens. That's something you can't do on a computer screen.

Jo's Finished Manuscript
(This scene from Little Women is what I've always dreamed my manuscript would look like one day)

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. :)

Battle plan for the last two days:

1. Fill in the missing parts on my outline.
2. Write like crazy and see if I can still make 100k.

Only 3 days left!!!

NaNoWriMo is nearing its end. I had hoped to post more in the past week, but I decided it was much more important to focus on my writing.
As a result, I wrote 10,000 words in one day!!! That was fun. And exhausting.

Up until now, my experimental method of outlining has proved to be incredibly helpful. But I wimped out on the last part of it, and it's not as detailed as I would like it to be. As I've been used to for the entire month. I'm finding that I'm having to make new decisions after all about how certain things are going to fit into the plot, and how they're going to happen. It's really slowing me down.

I now sit at 80,000 and am hoping to reach 100,000 still before midnight on Wednesday. Meaning I will have to write 6,667 words each day. I think I can do it, but even still, wish me luck!

Thanksgiving-ed!!!!

Hi all,

I got Thanksgivinged into nothing but a bump on a couch this past weekend. Part of my family had Thanksgiving early, and my writing time was taken up with preparing some food to bring, the party itself, and recovering from eating so much afterwards.

I've been sluggish and slow. But now that my cat has enjoyed all the cuddles he could get falling asleep on my lap while I sat on the couch, I'm ready to get back at writing, and posting, and hopefully there's enough left in the month to get a significant number of words written.

(He's stuffed.)

Terrible Tuesday and Word-War Wednesday

Sorry for missing the post yesterday. Since I hit 50k, I was a little burnt out for writing and took a day to recover. I wrote absolutely nothing yesterday.

Time to get back at it! And what better way to do that than to have a word war?

For this week, let's see how many words we can write in ten minutes again, but with a twist.

Do five sessions of ten minute sprints, then average your word counts. This isn't just a word sprint. It's a challenge to see how well we can write over time. It seems easy enough to crank out words in ten minute intervals. But to do that consistently is another matter.

Have fun!

Method Mondays

I reached 50,000 words!!!!!!!

Thanks to a write-in hosted by my friend Inspie_Girl, I was able to write 4,609 words today, bringing me just 100 words over the top of NaNoWriMo's traditional goal.

I've never hit 50k this early, and other years it's been a struggle to barely get enough words. So why is this year different?

Outlining.

As I've mentioned before, I've been using a combination of the Snowflake method and the Phase Drafting method. I was a little scared that putting so much time into an experimental outlining method without testing it first was risky. What if November came and I started writing, only to realize that my outline wasn't helping me get what I wanted?

But it has paid off. It is SO EASY to write using these methods and here's why I think it works: It separates the decision making process from the actual writing process.

I know not everyone writes using outlines and honestly, sometimes outlining is a pain. But outlining so far in advance this year has made it wonderful.

Good luck in your continued writing adventures! I'm off to write the next 50k! (But not tonight, of course.)

(To be confirmed by the NaNoWriMo word count bots on November 25)