NaNoWriMo

I’ve been quiet for awhile. I haven’t written too much. In October, I thought I might a fantasy novel later, so I started planning out things: making notes, starting an outline, and developing characters. I thought I might use it for NaNoWriMo, an annual contest to write 50,000 words in the month of November, but I decided to use a different idea. I still plan to write this fantasy novel, and on December 1, I picked up my notes again and started working on it. (My Profile for NaNoWriMo)

For NaNo, I settled on writing out a novelization of my ideal Christmas. I have a fairly detailed idea sketched out of what I feel would be the ideal way to celebrate our Savior’s birth, and I came up with four characters (ones that have been with me for awhile) to act it out. Throughout November, I worked at it. I tried to write about 2,000 words a day, but that didn’t work out all the time. Personal things came up half way through the month, and I stopped writing. The little I did write, I didn’t tell the NaNo site, so my word count did not update from the 17th until the 29th. I was then a little under 15,000 words short, and I thought I wouldn’t make it. With prayer and the knowledge that my family believed in me, I stayed up all night on the 29th. I wrote throughout the night, racking up about 10,000 words that night but was running out of words by 7a/8a or so. After church that Sunday the 30th, I took a 4-hour nap and only overslept by an hour. After those few hours of sleep, I was re-engergized, and I wrote nearly 4,000 more words. I made it with 50,094 words! Only about 30 of those words were chapter titles, so I made it!

I won NaNo! (Reaching 50,000 words is the way to win.) This is my first time ever winning. I’m very happy with myself.

The novel itself, I ended up loving more than I thought I would. I picked the idea because it would be easy and I was not attached to it as a plot for a novel, so I would not worry about writing filler and writing just to get to a word count without too much care for the content. However, my happy Christmas story took a dark turn halfway through it. There was a war going on in the background, and it did not stay in the background. The war took a more prominent role as the story progressed, and treason and deaths were introduced. Hence, I don’t think the first half really foreshadows the second. I don’t want it to give away any surprises of course, but it would be nice if the two did not seem like two halves of different plots.

The novel needs work and additions (the last chapter is only about half-written as at that point I was writing to get to 50,000), but that’s all editing. I have a novel write here on my computer, and while I may never try to get it published, I’ve written one. I know I can do it. I even learned things, such as 1,000 words a day is the pace I need to set for my fantasy novel (and others).

Good luck writing!

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