November 20, 2005 - Dragonchasers

Having finished writing my NaNoWriMo novel, I sat down to read the final chapters of No Plot? No Problem! by Chris Baty. The book is all about writing a novel in a month, and though it says you can pick any old month, it was clearly designed to promote and/or accompany nanowrimo.org. And I was forbidden to read these last chapters until after I finished!

Baty has a lot of fun with the book and its a nice read even if you’re not intending to do NaNo. He walks you through getting ready to write, coming up with a starting point, and then sends you off. But the back part of the book has a chapter for each week of November, and it was uncanny how accurate they were. When he said I’d be struggling…I was struggling! When he said words would be flying by, they were.

The end of the book talks about next steps. Determining if your NaNovel is worth polishing into a finished novel or not, and if it is, how to go about doing that. (Interestingly, he suggests it’ll take about a year to do re-writes on the book you wrote in a month!)

Throughout this month-long process, No Plot? No Problem! has offered tips as well as inspiration. Doing NaNoWriMo would be really freakin’ hard on your own, I think. I was lucky enough to have friends who supported me in ways beyond imagining. But if you were on a desert island, cut off from humanity, this book could serve as your friend and cheerleader.

Absolutely recommended, but probably not until next fall when you’re gearing up for NaNo. (I’ll be re-reading it then, too.)

And so it comes to an end.

The last 5000 words were almost physically painful. I ran out of story before I ran out of words. In a real world setting, the difference between 48000 words and 50000 probably wouldn’t be that big a deal, but dammit I wanted 50000!

So I went back to the beginning and started editing/adding. But it felt like every time I added something, I cut another bit. Finally at 49,200 words I said ‘screw it’ and went back and gave my main character and his love interest an explicit love scene.

If I were ever to try to make this into a sellable novel I’d clip that bit out since it doesn’t really fit in with the tone of the story, but then I’m sure in the course of editing the whole thing I’d make a lot of additions and changes and who knows where the word count would end up.

But I wanted to hit 50K today. I got out of bed, started writing, and aside from 1 or 2 very brief breaks, I’ve been sitting here every since (its almost 4 now). I just NEEDED to finish!

I wish I hadn’t had to go cheap with the sex scene, though. But oh well. I need to get up and stretch. 🙂

Dragonchasers

Day: November 20, 2005

No Plot, No Problem

The End