Well, I made it! I hit my goal and here I am on the other side. I didn’t write every day though I rarely do during NaNo. I’ll admit I’m a rebel and maybe my rebel goal is easier than the traditional 50K. I didn’t start until after my final exam on the 9th, which is the biggest cheat I allow myself. I realized when I did NaNo the traditional way that I could write the minimum 1667 words in about half an hour. Hate me if you will, but that’s what it took. So I held myself to 30 minutes of editing each day. To add some pressure, I made myself meet that goal each week. If I missed getting the 210 weekly amount by Saturday night, I would consider the whole thing a fail.
And I made it! You can look at my daily posts if you like for details, but I’ll say I made my goal by more than two hours. I finished going through the book from the mid-point I was at and went through it one more time. I added scenes for consistency and made some character changes. A lot of my writing was a write-ins at my local library. There’s a Detroit ML that came to all of them because he lives close by so I still felt connected to the region despite not attending any of their events. They did a stamp system to encourage participating and unfortunately, I ended with a total of four stamps.
I was going to start doing a go-through for dialogue consistency, but I think I’m going to change directions. I started reading Writing the Breakout Novel by Donald Maass and even three chapters in, I’m coming up with ways to make my story better. I need to change the pacing. I need to strengthen a subplot. I need to make my female lead character’s motivation stronger. In short, I need to make a better story before I worry about better dialogue. What I have so far is valuable. I got to page 13 or so and a lot of the changes I’ll make are much later in the book so I do plan to come back to this later.
I’m rejuvenated. I want to work on my novel again and to be honest, I’m kicking myself for typing this when I could be working on it! I’ll take the time to write the reviews I’ve missed and catch up, but I’m considering cutting back another post per week to spend more time writing. Maybe making one post per week a writing update instead of what I normally post. I want to work on it more, especially before school starts up again in February.
Congratulations to all the other winners out there. We survived! Happy writing.
You can follow me on Goodreads, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram. I’m available via email at SamAStevensWriter@gmail.com. And as always, feel free to leave a comment!
Taking On a World of Words 
Well done Sam! I missed the 50,000 word target by under 2000 words but am still pleased with how much I got written. Like you, I didn’t write every day – and there’s always next year!
LikeLike
Great job! 48,000 is a ton of words! I’m hoping to keep in the writing habit with my success this year. There’s no point in writing them and not looking at them again for 11 months! Happy writing!
LikeLike
I failed Nano pretty hard this year, but I’m not super heart broken about it. I write year round so I’m used to their being some ups and downs and I happened to get the flu for more than a solid week so that sucked. All things considered though, Nano is a wonderful time of year. It sounds like you got some quality editing done. Congratulations. I’ll have to check out that book. My old novel is in dire need of another round of edits.
LikeLike
I hope you’re feeling better now. Getting sick is the worst. I’m going to try to be better about editing year-round. I want to get this book to some Betas really soon but there are some changes I want to make first. Happy writing!
LikeLiked by 1 person
Thank you. I started feeling better just in time for December. There’s always next years nano. I think as long as we’re writing it doesn’t really matter if it’s in November or not. Good luck with the Betas. I’m not quite there yet either. Maybe in another couple of months.
LikeLiked by 1 person