Wednesday, November 18, 2009

NanoWriMo - Day 18

Words Written Today:  3080

And done.  The final first draft word count was 72768.  It came in a bit shorter than I expected, which is fine because I got in everything I wanted to.  When I got to the end, I felt like I was stalling a little bit, dragging out the closing up.  As a result, the last chapter is shorter than the others and will probably be fleshed out more in revisions.  At the end of the day, the story is done.  Complete.  And it feels really awesome.

And tiring.  I don't ever want to write a full first draft in 18 days again.  I think that there are positives and negatives to doing it this quickly.  On the one hand, keeping the momentum going really helped me keep focus on the story.  On the downside, I think that trying to work so hard led to a lot of rubbish writing that I'm going to have to work on in revision.  I think averaging about 2k per day with days off during the week is the best pace for me.

What do I do with the next 12 days?  Not sure yet, but I'll be writing a real NaNo wrap up later.  Like, what do I do with this book now that it's written?  Hint:  hide it for a few weeks and then revise it like crazy.

2 comments:

  1. Wow, wow, wow. I thought you were crazy for planning 80K in 30 days. Can't believe you pulled off 73K in 18 days. Amazing! Congrats!

    Is your book a one-off, or does it have "series potential"?

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  2. It was a little crazy. Okay, mostly crazy. It took me six weeks to do the first draft of The Deathday Letter and that was only 60k words.

    I gave the book a definite end but it has series potential. Kind of like Artemis Fowl in that each book is complete, but there are ongoing threads.

    Now comes the really hard part: Revisions!

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