Hello everyone.
By the time this is posted, NaNoWriMo will have wrapped up for about two weeks. The delay comes from the way I posted my progress during the competition, with my first post occurring four days into the month to summarize how day one had went, and the next post a week later giving an account for the first full week.
So how did I do?
Well…I missed the goal to write 50,000 words in November. I even cheated and I still fell short.
By “cheated” I mean that I was also including the words for the blog posts that I was writing during November, because they concerned updates on how Between the Maws and Claws was going. I even wrote extra posts, so now I have a small reserve in case I ever need to skip a week writing actual new ones. This is technically not allowable because the words weren’t towards the actual manuscript, but I included them because they were focused on the project I was working on.
And I still fell short by about 5,000 words. So, if anyone was tracking my career record for NaNoWriMo, I am now 0 for 3. I know that it has to do with my pace for writing novels. I don’t like rushing through a first draft, I prefer to take my time to help better understand the tone and voice of the book, as well as the characters. The longer I take to let the writing simmer, the more ideas spring to mind, small details to include, or thinking about how characters will behave to events in the story. Also, a first draft always needs a lot of work, and the more time I take writing the first draft, the more things I typically am able to spot to improve in the later drafts.
This is also the longest manuscript I’ve written for this contest. I knew that going in, but I didn’t know how much that would impact my writing. I really didn’t think NaNoWriMo suited writing this manuscript. For my three published novels, this format for writing works really well, because they were all novella length, cutting right to the point. For this manuscript, I knew I needed to take my time to let the story settle in, laying the foundation so that once everything’s in place, the story really accelerates to the explosive ending. I think I need to keep this in mind for manuscripts going forward, and whether NaNoWriMo will be a good fit for them.
This may all sound negative, but I’m actually pretty happy with where the manuscript is right now. I feel I’m about halfway done with the first draft, with a lot of ideas to improve it through the later drafts. The weight of word counts is now off my shoulder (until I’m done with the first draft and will need to start focusing on edits), and the changes I’ve made to the writing style seem to already be paying off, as I’m noticing I’m having a much easier time writing pages, whittling the time down closer to my norms.
I’ll continue posting updates as I work through the rest of the first draft and beyond. NaNoWriMo may be done, but there’s still such a long way to go.
Until next time.