Nanowrimo 2010: WINNER!!!

I submitted my word count to Nanowrimo.org and I was rewarded with this image:

Huzzah!  I finished my novel this morning with 50,010 words.  Well, according to Nanowrimo, anyway.  My word counter on Scrivener had about 60 more words, so I'm not really sure what Nanowrimo isn't counting, but who cares?  I won, dammit!

It feels so good to claim victory, especially a little bit early.  I spent about four hours Saturday night and pounded out almost 8,000 words before I gave into the siren call of sleep.  And then this morning, Michael was really sweet and took Billa to the park so that I could finish the last 1,800 words and post my victory.  Not ten seconds after I finished whooping and hollering over my win, my husband and daughter walked in the door and saw me grinning like an idiot.  He knew why I was so happy and we celebrated by purchasing a bottle of wine to enjoy with our dinner and movie for this evening.

I am so relieved to have finished.  I gladly took on the challenge and while I am proud of my accomplishment, I didn't realize how much pressure and stress I was feeling from the challenge!  But like last year, I learned so much about myself and my writing.  As I mentioned previously, I had started with another idea, but nixed it in favor of an older one.  I'm glad I did, because I am looking forward to editing that story soon.  It's total crap right now, but with a little hacking here and there, I think it will be much better.  i also learned a lot about where I need to improve my skills as a writer.  I'm good at dialogue, plotting, and characterization, but I need to do some serious work on describing things and figuring out how to tease the details to keep the reader engaged. 

I'm also relieved because during the course of this year's challenge, I came up with several more novel ideas and now I can actually start them!

Thank you to all of the wonderful people at Nanowrimo for putting together this year's challenge and especially to all my friends and family for encouraging me to keep going.  I want to give a shout out to my friends Victoria and Michelle for joining me in the challenge and helping to keep me on track and moving along.  I hope you two are winners too!

Excitedly yours,
Kelly

Writing Woes: An update on NaNoWriMo 2010

I have to say that Nanowrimo is kicking my butt this year although I'm a bit ahead of where I was last go 'round.  As of this writing, I have finally reached the halfway mark of 25,000 words.  Woot!  But I'm still struggling with it.  I should have hit that mark Monday night and instead I hit it Thursday at lunchtime.  I have to hit 37,500 this upcoming Monday night if I want to stay on track.

As one of the pep talk emails said, "I've been Week Two'd."

It's traditional to start the month roaring and to finish the month mewing like a lamb.  Week Two is typically where a alot of writers stumble.  The pizazz they started with has fizzled and they're starting to really question the soundness of the decision they made.  I started the month scrambling for an idea that I felt I could commit myself to and yet, the idea I came up with just didn't resonate after five days.  I know, I probably should have stuck with it, but I had such an aversion to it that there was no way words were going to fly out of my finges.  So I scrapped it.

By this point, of course, two of my writing buddies were way ahead of me.  Crap, I thought.  [cue dramatic moan] What am I gonna write about?!  I started digging through the scrap pile of my hard drive.  There is a folder on my desktop entitled "Kelly's Writing" - any idea I have, any manuscript I'm working on, journal entries I've written, they all end up in that little blue folder that stares at me every day.  The scrap pile revealed to me that I had a story idea I'd ben entertaining in the back of my brain for almost three years.  I totally lucked out because I even had close to 5000 words already written of it!  Technically, it's cheating, yes, but I'd already written 5000 words of the other story, so it's all a wash at the end of the day.  I put in the effort, dammit, and twice at that!

So this buried treasure is what I've been working on but I keep finding myself getting distracted.  I've had to go so far as to turn of my web browser, because otherwise, I'll be tempted to lurk through Facebook, or blog troll, or look up other random useless trivia to lock away into the recesses of my brain.  Yeah, that's my life.  Great, isn't it?

I was really proud of myself for banging out almost 5000 words this morning and I hope to repeat it tomorrow so that I can get a little bit closer to 37500 by Monday.  It won't be easy, but I know that I am more inclined to met deadlines hen they're hanging over my head.  Nothing like the proverbial feeling of "do it or die!" to get ya going in the morning!

And this time, I am determined to actually take time and edit the story once it's written.  It may still be crap after I've hacked it apart a few times, but if I'm ever going to be a published writer (notice I didn't say REAL writer...that's a sound off waiting to happen, mark my words!), I need to get to a point where I can actually feel confident about my work to send it to an agent.

So here's to 50k and beyond...12 more days to hammer out 24,858 words!

Cheers,
Kelly