Well, I didn’t make that 60k. I came painfully close, but I just couldn’t write 10,000 words in two days. I knew that when I hit the 50K mark on the 28th, so I said to myself: “Well, you did 53k in 2008, 54k in 2009, so you’re going to make 55k in 2010.” I was surprised by the extra 2,000 words I managed to squeeze in at the end, bringing my official total up to 57,073 (It could have been 57,984, but I lost track of time, and scrambled to get to the word count validator before 11:59 changed to 12:00, but didn’t quite make it). I must say that, even though this year’s NaNoWriMo ended up being a battle until the very end (In the past, I have been finished much further in advance), and this story started out as a struggle, this is probably the most fulfilling NaNoWriMo I’ve taken part in.
First of all, I am only another few thousand words from the end. The end! That is extremely exciting for me, the person who always has such a hard time with the R-Z portion of the A-Z of writing a novel. I am actually expecting to be back here before next Wednesday to write a celebratory “It’s Finished!” blog for all to see.
Then there’s the fact that I have been working steadily on a story that is so different from my usual style. If it weren’t for NaNoWriMo, I would have set it aside by day 14 to move on to something else. Something I would have been more comfortable with. Something that wouldn’t have been such a challenge. Don’t get me wrong. I like a challenge! If I didn’t, I would have no business even attempting NaNoWriMo, but when writing gets hard, I get discouraged and feel the need to change to something different. Thanks to NaNoWriMo, I didn’t, and now I have a nearly completed novella to show for it.
The final boost NaNoWriMo 2010 has given me is the knowledge that I type very well under pressure. I was averaging 2k words for the first few days, then started to struggle to reach that minimum 1667, but on the 28th, I saw that I needed to pick up the pace and managed to write 3019 words. Wow! Then I repeated that exact same number on the 29th (no joke!) and kicked it up to 4182 (a little over 5k, if you count the extra 900 I didn’t manage to validate on time!)! Of course, let’s not talk about typos.
What to do, now that NaNoWriMo 2010 is over? Well, though my family and friends probably won’t understand it, I have to keep typing. Of course, I can get my after work shower at 11 instead of waiting until midnight, because I’m not writing to meet a deadline, and I can relax with the word count a bit (though I still keep checking), but I need to type, and I want to. I want to finish this novella, add in the portions I skipped over (this is the first time I’ve ever gotten stuck and skipped ahead instead of stagnating until I managed to get going again), then read the thing and start the editing process. I’m ready. Current word count: 59,442. Ready? Here we go…
My Final NaNoWriMo 2010 Stats
Ink on My Hands 