I Did It At Last!

*play 'Chariots of Fire' here*

After 3 years of NaNoWriMo failure, this year I hit the 50,000 word mark.

*applause*

Thank you, thank you.

My novel isn't quite done, but it's getting close to a climax I think. It is also really awful, but that's okay. I had no plan when I began except for a general idea of a very unstructured plot. I didn't have any characters ahead of time. The first 20k or so words are mostly me learning who my characters are. It isn't riveting reading. They spend a lot of time wandering around the space ship thinking stuff. But that's what it took for me to know enough about them to stat making stuff happen. Now that exciting stuff is happening, NaNoWriMo is over. I'm not stopping though. I probably won't keep up the pace I have been, because - well- it's really hard, and I'm really sleepy, but I'm going to do my best to keep working on it every day until it's done.

I've really written so much more this month than I thought I was capable of. I started on Nov 1st planing to lose again this year. I don't know where my attitude shifted, but I'm so happy it did. I think some credit should go to my friend Amanda. She signed up for NaNoWriMo this year too, and her encouragement and the cometition of having someone to keep up with was a very helpful motivational boost, especially in the beginning when I still thought it was going to be impossible.

So to all the other NaNoWriMo winners out there - a big high five to you! And to any who didn't hit 50k this year, a high five to you too for trying, and for writing whatever you did. It's still more than most people do. Yea for us!

I'm A guest with LK Hunsaker Thoughts and Sketches

LK Hunsaker invited me to write a guest post for her blog Thoughts and Sketches. She's doing a series of guest posts on the subject of NaNoWriMo. At first I didn't think I had anything worthwhile to add to a discussion of NaNo. I've failed every year I tried it after all. But as I thought about those failing years, and the fact that, even so, here I was, back at it again, I began to see that I actually did have an opinion or two on the subject.

So a big "Thank You" to LK for the push to do some deep thinking about my NaNo journey. Also, she's a terrific author. I've enjoyed every book I've read from her, and am reading Off the Moon right now. I highly encourage you to poke around her website and pick up one of her published novels if you get the chance.

Kara's NaNoWRiMo guest blog post.

NaNoWriMo Widget

Just wanted an excuse to use one of the widgets. Plus, I just love the word 'widget'.




P.S. to my writer friends: they have word war widgets too if you're game.