National Novel Writing Month – I finished.

My latest novel manuscript is off to a flying start thanks to National Novel Writing Month. I am 50,963 words in, about halfway through. I really enjoy the story I am writing, although my characters are not. The five of them are in a precarious situation with absolutely no idea what is happening. They have theories, but none of them is close. I am looking forward to springing the big revelation on them.

This was the third time I had done NaNoWriMo, and it was the hardest. There was no novelty thrill. This time, I did not reach 50,000 words until the final day. My long-term illness was up and about for just about the whole month, and the medication I take for it tires me. The illness also made it uncomfortable to sit for extended periods. I wrote in blocks of 300-500 words and then had a break and did something else for half an hour or so. I wrote well into the evening on most days to pass the daily average of 1667 words.

I did this NaNoWriMo primarily to increase my output and dedication to writing. This it has done. I now spend a lot more time thinking about my writing, often stopping what I am doing to write down notes. This morning, I even thought up some ideas while swimming that I had to remember until I finally finished my laps to write them down. Until this morning, I had been very good at avoiding thinking about writing while swimming for fear of forgetting killer ideas by the time I had finished.

It will be interesting to see how much I write this month. I have a new article for Divine to write this week that requires a lot of research, and I now have nearly three months of newspapers stacked up to read. Lots of ideas for Divine articles come out of the newspapers, and I believe writers must keep themselves informed, so there is no way I am throwing them out until they have been thoroughly scoured. But while catching up on reading them and writing more articles for Divine, I hope to write at least 15,000 words of my novel this month.