Juiced On Writing

Today, I won NaNoWrimo, verified wordcount being at just a tiny bit over 104,000. I picked up my PDF certificate, downloaded one of the winner buttons to post up here, and now it’s done.

How sad, to find myself at the end of my novel. The first draft is now in full manuscript form, and backed up in Liquid Story Binder (the writing software I use for initial writes), and files are about to be slotted away into an electronic bottom drawer for a while.

I’ll give it a month, and return to the novel for rewrites in the New Year. For Posterity, here is my Summary of the Journey.

The Journey in Summary : In Memory of the Birth of a Novel

This particular novel – my second, was almost unplanned a month before I was due to start it. It was simply a minor thought and one sentence designed as an exercise through Holly Lisle’s How to Think Sideways writing course online (which remains running for another month or so). Holly had us develop three new ideas for novels into a single sentence. This was in the month of August, and I happened to be on our family holidays at the time, so was hardly likely to come up with anything highly scintillating, as far as I and my family were concerned.

In September I fussed around actually doing NaNoWriMo itself. I had – and ridiculously now, have even more, other commitments and calls for my time, and wasn’t particularly feeling inspired in spending so many hours writing when I simply didn’t have a “big idea”.

In the second to last week of October, my own guilt got the best of me. I’d publicly promised no one in particular, that I was doing NaNoWriMo, and writing was meant to be my main objective for the year. Using guilt and public faith as a motivating factor seems to eventually work for me.

Using Holly’s later course contents which came through that month – this time on preplanning, and planning simply scenes, I did that, making up the entire plot on the spot, using Writing Blocks software to hold the cards. I chose to go with a minimum 2000 words per scene, and wanted about 60,000 words to go over the target of NaNoWriMo by a safe 10,000. 2000 words per day, for 30 days, that seemed well within my capabilities without impacting too much on my other tasks over the weeks.

I prepared my software, did some much needed research in advance, and then sat and waited. The journey in writing has, like everyone’s, had it’s ups and downs. I’ve had two lots of bad health during the month – the first on the first week, the last right now, at the end of it. There has also been days when I could hardly bear to open up my laptop, and I’ve bearly managed the one scene. There have been a couple of days where I’ve not wanted to stop writing all day at all.

In Week 2, my part-time employer managed to force me into a twelve month course involving travel and days worth of homework, internal and external assessments – and I was late starting the course by over a month when I arrived reluctantly into it.

In Week 3, Holly Lisles course moved onto a month on Endings. And it couldn’t have come at a better time. I was facing a rather boring planned ending – not that I’d followed my original scene cards preplanned much at all. Holly’s course notes may not have given me the exact ending I needed, and I didn’t have time to write out and plan those as she intended, but reading them, simply triggered something in me. I got excited. I sent her a twitter message thanking her. I moved on, finally, after hitting more than a bit of a stump spot, where I was writing all week, but not making any progress through the middle and climax of the novel at all.

This week, I added 12,000 words on one day, in my excitement to get to that ending I wanted. But I also took more than three days off the seven, some for some family time – Christmas shopping before the crowds get too bad, and some because of sickness.

Then there’s the other side of being a working mother and wife – while writing. The guilty side of it, where things have been left undone. And for what, you wonder? Is a novel just so darned important?My dog’s walks have almost disappeared for the month – but I’ve promised to make up for that starting next week, and of course – there was the awful little note my daughter left me this last week, because I was spending too much time on my computer, and not playing with her.

Today, I sat down, and wrote. I didn’t care anymore about the quality of that final chapter, I just wanted it out of me, and done. The novel has transitioned now, out of my mind, and finally fully onto paper. Through this week, I’ve not only felt some hopelessness, but also begun to question my entire writing style I’ve seen on the paper. Formatting it out into a proper manuscript today, and noticing how many paragraphs are single short sentences, the pure formation of the page in front of me – I now realise just how important that editing and rewriting process is.

However, I don’t have that clarity as yet. I’m too close and attached to the script. So I’m parking it for a month, catching up with that homework, reading over the How to Think Sideways coursework also, plus the upcoming weeks Holly will be providing on redrafting, and I actually think I might have something, in the new year, which might be in contention for submitting somewhere.

Is that the end of the journey? No, not really. It’s the beginning of a whole big other one for the New Year. And because of the paracetemol and what-not that I’ve taken to try to douse down my flu fever, I can’t even have that glass of bubbly I should have to celebrate my win. I couldn’t taste it, anyway. But my novel – well, that tastes kind of sweet and bubbly all to itself.

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