FINAL DAYS
#NANOWRIMO2016
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AMBER LOVE 29-NOV-2016 You can sponsor this site and my work at Patreon.com/amberunmasked. For information about my books including the Farrah Wethers mystery series, just head over to my Books page.
DAY 27 – SUNDAY
I thought I would end up under the 1,667 minimum target. I was somewhere around 1200 then 1400 when I hit rough patches. Managed to cruise to just under 2k. Broke 47k total.
DAY 28
A difficult morning. Slept a lot but it was broken up. Had a terrible headache most of the morning. Sat in bed watching Elementary and Bull. Made packages to mail out a couple copies of Full Body Manslaughter (forgot to sign one). I felt like I had taken a handful of Benadryl when I hadn’t had any for days (I’ve just suffered through the rashes and itching).
TODAY’S EXPECTATIONS:
I had it in mind that I’d break up the remaining 3,000 words into two reasonable chunks of 1,500 on Monday and Tuesday; then spend Wednesday doing some backtracking/editing/polish. However, it was such a difficult writing and health day. Purposely planning to be under the normal minimum was a good way to get through my last few days of this story.
I ended up at 1,625 for this writing session and over 48k words total. My main character has announced a couple of big changes to bring a good end to her development: she started out announcing a new thing that she wanted to do then faced a series of disasters ruining her life; and in the end, she wants to take that new thing and make it her own instead of following in someone else’s footsteps. It’s at 97% completion.
DAY 29
My goal today was to reach 50k and conclude the story. Happy to say, that happened after another foggy-brain start. At least I didn’t have a headache like yesterday. I slept crappy (woke up at 1AM, eventually got to sleep around 3:30 then woke up from a nightmare). Gus didn’t come back to his box until I was finished with the draft and working on backups.
I have been avoiding social media and TV news. Today I thought, maybe, just maybe I can look at Twitter and Facebook and still function. I lasted longer than I have been able to since November 9th. I have never been this distant before. I missed some emails but eventually saw them and responded when I could. I haven’t done much in terms of job hunting though I did glance at Indeed today and saw absolutely nothing. I don’t know when I’ll fully return to my old plugged-in routine. I’m using the ignorance at the moment to keep myself less desperately longing for death.
Then I sat down to write and was interrupted four times in about fifteen minutes. It finally got quiet and I cranked out the end of my story. I had started the ending and needed to backtrack to fill in the final chapter and then add more to the actual ending or epilogue. However it ends up, it’s a completed story and validated on the NaNoWriMo word counter.
In the few moments I was online today, I saw one of my friends post about giving up on NaNoWriMo because she could never complete it in time. She called herself a failure. I know how that feels. But the thing is, NaNoWriMo is supposed to be an exercise. It’s just a challenge for word counts. It’s about getting into the habit of writing daily which will then make you feel odd if you aren’t writing. That habit is what you want. It doesn’t matter if you don’t reach 50,000 words by November 30th. The month is arbitrary, as is the 50k total to be honest. Most novels clock in around 80k.
In my two previous years, when I reached 50k, I had a long way to go to actually wrap up the story. I wasn’t even in the third acts by then. This story is so different from my Farrah Wethers mysteries that breaking my mold and formula don’t bother me. I hope that whenever it comes out, if it comes out, readers will be fine with a shorter story too. I don’t know if there’s such a subgenre as “Old Lady Thrillers” but I think that’s what I wrote.
LINKS:
- /tag/NaNoWriMo
- Interview with Jolene Haley and Brian LeTendre
- Pinterest writing board (general)
- Pinterest writing board (Misty Murder)
- Day 1 post
- Week 1 journal
- Week 2 journal
- Week 3 journal
- Week 4 journal
- Week 5 journal
- Writing in and out of your comfort zone
- More milestones, rewards, and goals
- My books
- Amazon Author Page