Late last night, I dragged myself, weary and bloodied, across the NaNoWriMo finish line.
Well, not bloodied, but I was quite tired when I got there…especially since at one point Scrivener had my word count at 50,200 but when I plugged my text into NaNo’s validator, it came back with a result of 49,850. So I had to stay up a bit and do a little extra work to get myself over that line. I could have just done it today, but when I’m that close, I just want to kick it into gear and get it done.
So after three consecutive years of falling short during NaNoWriMo, I’ve resumed winning. Huzzah!!!
What now? Well, I only have about 46,000 words of a book that I’m targeting for around 200,000, so there’s a lot more writing ahead. (Yes, you read that right–46,000 words. Part of my NaNo total is roughly 4500 words of a scene that I eventually realized needed to be scrapped, but for the purposes of NaNoWriMo I never delete scrapped material, I just relocate it because it’s still work I did. I mean, a movie’s deleted scenes still got filmed, so that’s still work that got done.)
I am looking forward to backing off the pedal a bit in terms of writing. Cranking 1700 words a day tends to be my upward limit before my brain starts getting all jangly, and to get that much writing done I have to reduce my reading, which never makes me feel good. I find that when I enter a reading slump, a writing slump inevitably follows because the reading is what fuels the writing. I’ve been reading, but not as much as I would like and I’m happy to get some of that time back.
I’m also hoping to get back to things like updating blogs…but for now, as always….
