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Fine!

Wednesday, 30 November 2005 10:05 PM

I am so very, very done.

I finished NaNoWriMo 2005 with a ravishing total of 50,633 words. Of those, 24,725 were tossed together in the final week.

Key lessons learned:

• I accomplish more writing outside of my home than inside it.
• It is much, much better to make a little progress every day than to hope to catch up on weekends. So much other stuff happens on weekends. There's no time to write.
• Butler County is lucky to be home to many interesting and friendly writers. There will be several books coming out of this area, if I'm not mistaken.
• Throwing in an arbitrary plot element, such as a chocolate gun, creates interesting problems and twists. I will be taking outsider suggestions more often in the future.
• Taking a book plan seriously makes it hard to write the book. Taking a deadline seriously makes it easy to get words on paper. It's easy to confuse the two kinds of seriousness, and important to keep remembering their difference.

Incidentally, if you'd like to know to what depths my writing dropped in the quest to complete this project, here is the final paragraph of the manuscript:

Not moving his gun from my throat, he reached over and caught my chocolate covered fist. He raised it to his mouth, stuck out his tongue, closed his eyes, and licked.

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