NaNoWriMo

This year I participated in National Novel Writing Month, and tonight I passed the 50,000 word mark, making me a winner.

Take that, Erin! :)

A synopsis of Stars Will Fall Out:
When Jil Doyle skips her homecoming dance, she witnesses a mysterious girl sink into the pond at the park. The next day she finds a strange vial that allows to her travel through the pond and into another world, where she meets Aria, the mysterious girl. Aria has been traveling from her own world to Jil's to go to rock shows and escape her daily life working at a bakery and planning her upcoming wedding. Soon Jil finds herself using the vial to escape like Aria, and both girls are balancing double lives. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to Jil and Aria, the creator of the vials has a sinister reason to steal them back, and it might be connected to the stars that have been falling out of the sky. Only Aria's nerdy fiance suspects that her sister Violet might be at the center of it all, but not even he realizes that the innocuous professor of magic might be as well.

Starting off in Week 1, it took some time getting used to writing 1,667 plus words per day. I was still focusing too much on good writing rather than output, but I did make a couple plot/ character connections that established the rest of the story arc. Luckily, I had some scene ideas written down so I didn't have to spend too much time thinking about what to write. During Week 2, I spend three days too depressed to write, and gave up completely. Giving up like that, I felt strangely empty, and I went back to writing just before the start of Week 3, although I was still depressed

Around Thanksgiving, I had a five-day weekend so I wrote 2000-4000 words on each of those days. After the first week, I also went to all the Write-ins at Barnes and Noble in Bellingham, where I managed to type 1000 words or so per hour. About this time, I concentrated on making my friends "effective agents of guilt and terror" as per the instruction in No Plot? No Problem! by Chris Baty, the founder of NaNo.

Two days ago I managed a 7000 word day, and today I wrote another 4500 for the win. A lot of the writing is crap, but plenty is crap that just needs editing. I still need quite a few more scenes, including a climax that involves a Winnebago and a Ancient Druid Spirit, and possibly a wedding. I'll also need to figure out a lot of details about the fantasy world, which I'm writing in a steampunk style, and then name or rename several characters.

After that, it'll just take about five edits or so.

And, Dan: Thanks for the support, and the sparkly bubbling stuff and chocolate just now.

Here's my Nano Profile, which has statistics, and an excerpt.

Wheeeee! I'm a novelist now. :)
X-posted to My Barely Updated Livejournal