30 Nov 2018

NaNo 2018 - The End

NaNoWriMo is over!  Time to breathe and relax!  For everyone who participated, whether you reached 50 000 words, reached a personal goal, or just made it to the end, take a bow.

My official word count is 57 635 as validated by the NaNo site.  That's a little above average for a NaNo project for me.  Considering that I had no idea where the story was going even as I was writing, I'll take it!  Seriously, my approach was to figure out what sounded good, then used that as an intermediate target.  The ghost of a Confederate officer controlling ghouls in order to wreak havok upon the North?  Sure, sounds good.  Zombie Elvii defeated through music?  Beats anything else that I can think of, which wasn't much.  Mermaid attacks in the Middle East?  Works for me!  None of that was even in mind on November 1st.  The mermaid attack only came up last weekend.

What did I have?  Three characters who could argue for several pages as needed.  It's great when there's a conflict between leads.  They do and say all sorts of things that let me mark time until I know what I'm doing.  Heaven's Rejects was completely pantsed, more that The Elf's Prisoner was.  Not that I use outlines normally; only By the Numbers had one, and even that was sparse.  I do try to have a few scenes in mind to aim for while I'm writing, though.  This year?  I knew how to get Nadia and Ian to meet Demona, but that's was it.  That was one chapter.  I finished NaNo at the beginning of Chapter 12.

In terms of writing, my best days were Sundays, during the library write-ins.  Once I got going, I could regularly reach 2000 words in a day, with just a few days where I didn't make that.  The worst was the second day, with 92 words written.  I was out of town for most of the day with no way to write, though I did spend time trying to figure out where I was going.  This year wasn't the first time I had to fight back from a deficit, even that early in the year.

What's next with Heaven's Rejects?  A lot of clean up.  Fix some spelling, fix some grammar, maybe add needed scenes that I couldn't think of at the time.  Maybe adjust the chapters to be more even, since the goal is to serialize the story.  I won't have the problem that dba LTV Paranormalists had with the first arc being a complete mess.  It's a minor clean up instead of a major rewrite.

This was a fun year.  Again, challenging because of life stuff, but I made it!  Yay!

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