Life After NaNo

Well, I did it. I finished my 50,000 words before midnight on November 30 and won the challenge. Actually, I reached my goal Thursday night but I wanted to add more words on Friday to get my "update your wordcount 30 days in a row" badge. And my reward? One more unfinished novel to add to my collection. LOL

That seems to be my pattern. I reach my 50,000 by the end of the month and…stop. NaNo’s over so I deserve a break right? My novels are usually in some stage of being close to finished. Some just need a scene or two, some more, but all of them need more work. Hence me my having 8 or 9 unfinished novels sitting around collecting dust.

The other thing I’m in the habit of is coming up for air at the end of NaNo, realizing Christmas is just three weeks away, and set the writing aside until the holidays are over. Inevitably, January rolls around and I’ve lost all desire to write and it takes weeks before I manage to get it back.

So this year I’ve decided two things.

First of all, I’m going to continue working on my NaNo novel. It’s one hot mess, and I’ve jumped around a bit, but I’m going to continue working on it until it is ready for editing. I figure another 15-20,000 words ought to do it.

When I ran into problems early on, I skipped ahead a couple of times, and then had some interesting ideas for the ending so I skipped to the end and wrote about 10,000 words for it. I did close the gaps in the first part, but there’s a good 15,000 words to bridge the beginning to the end. And then I just have to finish the very end – which may or may not include an epilogue.

The thing is, I like this story. And it’s a stand alone, not attached to any series, so there’s no reason I can’t make it available by next Christmas.

The second thing I’m going to do is keep writing throughout December. As in write every day. Magic II is going on the back burner for now – I don’t even have Magic I finished yet so there’s no rush for the sequel. It was more just to fill in the ‘what can I write’ gap when I ran out of steam with Wandering Wizards.

It’s always good to have more than one project on the go, that way if you just aren’t feeling it for one story, you can switch to the other. No sitting around trying to figure out what to write today.

So, that’s my plan, anyway. And that being said, I did no writing (except blog posts) on the weekend – I went Christmas shopping one day and present wrapping the next. But since this post and my other one were scheduled Sunday night, I’ll be starting my day off right – with time spent writing.

To do so I’ll have to ignore the mess my office has become. I’d hoped to get it cleaned up over the weekend but there just wasn’t time. But it doesn’t matter where I write, just so long as I write.