When you’re participating in the NaNoWriMo event, there are two major milestones you always have in mind. One, of course, is 50,000 words. You have to get there or you don’t win. The other one is the end of your story. Ideally, the end and the 50,000 words will show up at around the same time, but it doesn’t always work that way. The first year I won, I needed around 82,000 words to wrap things up. The second time I won, I believe I blew past 60K without ever finding the ending. This year, given how much trouble I was having keeping to my writing schedule, I couldn’t afford to let the story go on for too long because there was no way I could keep up the pace once the 30-day deadline was though.

This is why I worked on a 2,000 words per day schedule. I’d get 60,000 words in November with that schedule, and if I couldn’t wrap the story in 60,000 words then maybe I wasn’t focused enough. When I fell 2 days behind and was never able to completely catch up, I was worried that I’d hit 50K but not “The End”, and this worrying caused me to focus in on plot more than I ever have before. And when I hit 50K on Day 27, I knew that at best I had 6,000 more words to work with, and possibly more like 4,000. The pressure was on.

Long story short (as if), I finished the story on Day 29 with a shade over 56,000 words. Hit the end with an entire day left to go, which is something I would’ve thought impossible way back on Day 1. Of course, on Day 1 the entire project felt mostly impossible because, as I’ve mentioned before, I had nothing back on Day 1. Not even a single idea. And yet here I sit on Day 30 with a 56,000 word story sitting on my hard drive waiting for a rewrite. On Days 1 through 29 I battled with my work schedule and my personal life to bang out approximately 2,000 words a day. On Day 30, I rested, except for rewriting 2 scenes right near the end that I had to fix because they bugged me all day.

Just for the hell of it, here’s how things started late the night of Day 1:

I grew up in an apartment building that I hated every minute I lived there.

I can almost guarantee that sentence will not appear in any future drafts of this story in whatever form it ultimately takes. And here’s how things wrapped on Day 29:

“Ah, well, no big deal. Memory’s a flaky thing anyway.”

I actually started to write one last paragraph after that, but that line seemed a good stopping point after all that had come before. I won’t be surprised if it doesn’t appear in any future drafts either, but you never know.

Now that NaNoWriMo is over, Happy Friday will be returning to this space, either this Friday or next, depending on how fast I can recover from the sleep-deprivation of the past month. Also coming back to this space will be updates on whatever creative project I take on next, because I had fun documenting this and you don’t have to read it if you don’t want to. I’m not sure what that next creative project will be, but I’m hoping it won’t take too long to figure out.

After I do the initial read of this book, I might be looking for a couple of impartial readers to give it a look. If you’re interested in being one of them, shoot me an email or comment to this post and I’ll consider it. I may end up bypassing that step entirely, so please don’t be offended if you are interested and in the end I say no. I appreciate the interest, believe me. Hell, I appreciate the time any of you spent reading all these posts this month. I hope I didn’t cure too many cases of insomnia while documenting my crazy quest to write a 50,000 word book in 30 days. See you all in Happy Friday soon, and see you all back here next November for my next crack at NaNoWriMo (well, maybe).

T “step away from the keyboard, sir,” green

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