Hello, bitchez. Have you missed me? I have missed you–and blogging. I kind of took blogging for granted before I embarked on my third NaNoWriMo, and I didn’t realize how much I got out of it. So I am back with a vengeance, though I cannot say better than ever.
First, housecleaning details: 200,220 words for NaNoWriMo! I had to revise my original goal due to brutal sickness, and I was unhappy about it for a bit. Then, yesterday, as I was struggling to bang out the final 2,000 words, I realized that 200,000 words was pretty damn good for a month’s worth. I gotta tell you, those last 2,000 nearly killed me. I kept checking my count, and it would only be up a hundred or two hundred words. I was averaging 2,500 words per hour for most of the month. The last two thousand took me three hours to write.
Then, I went to verify my word count, and I couldn’t get my whole manuscript through. WTF? I tried half the manuscript and that went through. Three-fourths of the manuscript went through as well, but nothing more. I freaked out because I had put so much goddamn work into it, and I wanted every word counted. I emailed NaNoWriMo asking what the hell should I do? I finally checked the forums and discovered that their verifier was only programmed to handle 50,000 words. Now, I didn’t have a problem verifying in the past two years, but I didn’t go over 150,000 either year.
So, once I was verified, I had to manually change my word count. I can’t tell you how good it felt to see 200,220 in my word count. It felt so good, I didn’t even care (much) that I hadn’t met my original goal. I gave myself a well-deserved pat on the back for a job well done. Now, I just have to make sure I don’t do what I’ve done the past two years–lose all interest in my NaNoWriMo writing. *
This year, I finished one long-ass murder mystery that is filled with trauma, drama, sex, lust, intrigue, and lots more. I need to cut a good portion of it, but I am pretty pleased at how it turned out. For the second novel, I took one of the characters from the first novel (but not the protagonist) and made her the main character. I have about a third of it done, and I pretty much know where I’m going with it. The third novel is a little strange in that it’s a blend of fiction/nonfiction. I just started on that one, but I’m liking the energy in the early goings.
So, NaNoWriMo ’09 is in the books, and it was a smashing success. Yay, me!