Nanowrimo2017: On the other side


Well, I made it.
I made it out of Nanowrimo alive and with my sanity intact. My finished product, an overhaul of The Glass, the Thread, and the Fabric, came out better than expected and in need of some serious rewriting. I laugh because I allowed the characters to flourish more than I am used to. The result was some of the characters who weren't named or one-offs ending up doing more than they should have. Thus, that leads me to wanting to write them in more and give them more to do.
But for now I'm backing off of it and doing other things. It won't be until January at the earliest that I actually work on it again.

So, here's the part where I reflect on what I had done.

I managed to, in thirty days, write a novel by the minimum length. My coworker also participated with some pushing from me. There were several nights where we worked together where instead of our usual hell-raising jokes, we had quiet writing time. This was were my Bluetooth keyboard and portable power pack charger (as well as file sharing apps) became massively handy.
To be brutally honest, I might not have accomplished the task without them. There were 10 hour nights where I literally slammed out thousands of words. There were nights where I just took time off and played Pokemon too. So, fair trade off.
I don't know what the next Nanowrimo holds, but I plan to keep doing them as long as I can, even if I have to attend movie premiers or something like that in-between.
The other thing that saved my can was the outlining I did. I outlined the characters' wants and needs, as well as a sort of basic outline for sections of chapters. What I mean is that in my notebook, I wrote down the major plot points that needed to be covered followed by how many chapters I wanted to spend covering that event. Sometimes it was easy, sometimes that made it harder. Sometimes it allowed me to better see how long a lead-up should be. Other times it had me questioning why I would spend that much time on one area.
To that extent, I want to start doing that more. I went back to Run for Me and its a mess now. I have no idea where or how that's going.

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