This is it!
My final update for NaNoWriMo 2020 (probably), and it’s time to see how far we got.
As I’m writing this, my novella stands at just a little over 36k words. I have a few days left, which I reckon will take me to somewhere around 38k, but there’s nowhere I’ll reach 50. Though, that was never my point anyway. I wanted to write a novella – because I think NaNoWriMo is perfect for that – and I’m very happy with what I’ve got.
I imagine the story will be done at somewhere around 40-42k words. We’re at a point of climax in the story now, ever rising, and I just got to find a way to drive it home before everything is revealed.
This story has been great to write – it’s turned out (almost) exactly how I envisioned it (so far, at least). Though I’m a pantser, I went in with a very clear idea of what this was going to be (which I mentioned in Updates 1, 2 & 3), and most of that came true.
Around the 70% mark of the book I realized my plan wasn’t as fully fleshed out, but that’s where the perk of being a pantser came into play, and I think it turned out pretty exciting. I also have a few ideas that never actually made it into the 1st draft (not yet, at least) but I’ll note those down and see if they end up making an appearance after the first round of revision.
So, in the next few days I hope to be done with this story. Then comes the long wait, 2-3 months or so, where I don’t even think about it at all. That’s how I work. I draft, revise and edit several projects all at once, on rotation. So when this is done, I put it away for a while, trying to forget about it (a trick I learned from Stephen King’s On Writing). In a few months time I pull it back out from its folder, dust it off, and read through it without doing anything except for taking notes. Then I’ll draft something else while I revise this.
I’m looking forward to seeing what I think of if when I get to that stage – I’m often pleasantly surprised, and I love my two previous NaNoWriMo projects! I hope to maybe find homes for them soon.
How’s your NaNoWriMo been this year? Did you kick ass? Was it everything you ever dreamed and more? Or was a bit of a struggle? Let me know!
Trey Stone, Author 