The Win is Official

Look, I've got a banner that says Winner on it and everything. It must be official.

NaNoWriMo victory is mine

I've done it - I reached 50,000 words this afternoon!

The story actually ended right at the 50k word mark, which was extraordinarily well timed (and completely accidental) but it needs some serious editing. There are some parts that I know are absolute guff, and some that have been glossed over and need a lot more detail added in. Plus, my characters are rather devoid of personality at the moment and I need to go back and give them some. I reckon it'll finally end up at around the 80k word mark. Anyway, that's for another day. I'm not going to start editing right now. I'm just going to rest on my laurels for a little while - I'm a NaNoWriMo winner :-)

Novel slowing down

We are nearly at the end of Week 2 and my novel has really slowed down. I'm at 35k words, which sounds impressive, but I did the first 20k words in three days so you can see how much my pace has slowed. I'm still just as excited about my story as I was at the start, but it seems to be in the doldrums. I know where I've been, and I know where I'm ultimately going, but I can't quite see the way clear to get myself out of the current situation gracefully and believeably. I'm slogging along, writing in 400 word bursts, but the story is definitely not flowing.

My aim for this weekend was to hit the 50k goal, but after struggling all day (it's a public holiday here today so I had no work to do) I only churned out less than four thousand words, and we are going to a wedding tomorrow afternoon, so unless I get a sudden burst of inspiration on Sunday I don't think I'll meet that goal. I'll settle for 40k instead, if I can make that by Sunday evening. Let's see what happens!

Novel going well

All is quiet on the blog update front, but my novel is going well so far. I'm a week ahead of schedule and am roughly half-way through my plot, so I'm pretty pleased with my progress at this point. It's full of holes, stilted dialogue, and missing chunks of storyline, but that doesn't worry me since it's only a first draft. And on that note, I'm off to see if I can reach my daily word count!