Monday, November 30, 2009

The End

Ah! It's over! NaNoWriMo is over! I can now go back to watching TV and other useless activities in the evenings!

(I think I just overdosed on exclamation points.)

I think I kind of cheated. My novel ended up being this long rambling inside the minds of four characters. It got badly out-of-focus and off-topic and working on it was like pulling teeth for the last two weeks, because I wasn't going to start all over again. So tonight I spent my last thousand words modifying the "It was only a dream" cop-out . . . I mean, "construct." My version was, "It was only a NaNoWriMo novel gone wrong," and I had two til-then never encountered characters talking about the inconsistencies of the characters and whether it was a good story or not.

Look. I'm agreeing with you. It was a cop-out. But also look. It took me 48,500 words to get to the point I had intended to write about in the first place, so I wasn't going to be wrapping it up any time soon, and I had to, by midnight tonight. And . . . I wanted to, because if winding it up took this long, I sure didn't want to to see what wrapping it up was going to look like.

Tomorrow, perhaps, I shall give you a new list of things I've learned from this process, or otherwise bore you with the philosophical musings this has brought up. Meanwhile, take a gander at that nifty little new badge in my sidebar.

1 comment:

Linda M Au said...

Hi, I found your site via your uncle John (an old friend of mine from his Pittsburgh days), since he saw I am an avowed NaNoWriMo freak--I mean, writer.

Let me assure you that you did NOT cheat by writing and meandering aimlessly the way you did at the end. That's part of the glorious fun of NaNoWriMo, and it happens to me at some point every year. Since I spend the next year finishing and editing my NaNo novel from the previous November, I have learned just how far afield the story can get during a single month of writing insanity.

Congrats on sticking with it. It's a real rush, isn't it? November has become my favorite month of the year. (It's the one month of the year my family says things like, "Shh! Mom's writing!"