Well, now that I'm on the other side of NaNoWriMo and I have something resembling a novel to show for it, I thought I might take a few moments to update my thoroughly neglected blog.
My book, if you want to call it that, isn't quite finished. That wasn't part of the deal, only that I reach 50,000 words in 30 days. I stopped writing at 50,004 and I really don't have much further to go, but once I reached the goal I needed to take a few days off.
It's a little less than 90 single spaced, 12pt, Times New Roman pages. I'm not sure what that works out to in a paperback format, but I'd assume it would be slightly more.
I plan to take an evening sometime next week, and finish up the story, and then begin another arduous task. Editing the thing.
That's going to be quite a process, I think. I plan to go back through every single page and edit for content, grammar, and punctuation. It'll probably take me longer to edit it than it did to write it. Once I've gone through it a couple of times, I'm going to trade with my friend, Tim, who also wrote a novel last month, and edit his, while he goes through mine one more time. Once all editing and rewriting is done, we plan to publish them together in one book, probably over at cafepress. I'll let you know if that ever actually happens.
In regard to the actual process of writing a novel in a month:
It was hard.
But not as hard as I'd thought. Once I decided that I needed to write every single day, no matter what else was going on, it was just a matter of continuing to have ideas. That's one thing that's never been a problem for me. There were definitely nights that I sat in front of the computer for two hours and only produced 300 words, but there were other nights, too. Nights that I was able to crank out almost 3500 words in just a few hours.
All in all, I'm glad it's over, but I look forward to doing it again next year.
