Category: Books and Writing

I’m thrilled to announce that my “True Life Tale” appeared on NaNoWriMo’s blog today. I won’t say anything about it here. It speaks for itself.

I did it! I completed NaNoWriMo with just over an hour to spare! I wrote about 10 thousand words this week but it all came quite easily. I was worried in week three as my plot was wrappinng up at around 40,000 words and I had to either do the literary equivalent of thinking about baseball players or let it run its course and fill in the missing 10K words in other ways. I chose that path and spent this week adding a good amount of missing description, additional chapters in the middle which better fleshed out some sections and a whole series of events after the grand climax of the book which effectively added a second (and then third) larger set of climaxes (multiple climaxes, my book is so lucky!)

But it’s done. Amusingly enough, the differences between how Pages (iWork ’08) counts words and how NaNoWriMo’s validator counts them meant that I wrote about 50,200 or so. When I uploaded it for counting, it came back as 49,999. So, I added two more: “The End.”

This was a fantastic experience. I have always wanted to write but never had any ideas. This process where I just start writing and see what happens had some really interesting ideas come out of nowhere. Now I know I do have ideas and feel a lightness and freedom I have not felt in ages. I can’t wait until next November. In fact, I won’t. I plan to rework a lot of this book or just shelf it and work on something else.

But, first, time to do some reading and some crossword puzzles. I’ve been starving myself this month to get the book written. Now I can relax and return to my vices.