NaNoWriMo = Evil...but I WON!
I stayed up all night last night.... I took a 5-hour nap after church.... I have 50,094 words!!! About 30 or so of those are from the chapter titles, but I still made it! It took Christmas song lyrics, a bit of breaking down the fourth wall, explaining in detail how to wrap a present, and a bunch of filler...but I MADE IT! *dies*
I took the suggestion of one of the e-mails, and I have two or three Christmas songs (part or whole) being sung by the characters. I did not take out the part that said >>Chapter # - Title, so I have 30 or so words (depending on how NaNo's word count works) that aren't part of the story in there. I also broke the fourth wall at times with characters or the narration talking about how the author needs more words for NaNo.
I wrote steadily through the first half of the month. There is an increase in the word count up until the 17th. Then I felt bad and was having a really hard time, and my word count plateaud. I did a little writing in that time, but it wasn't much, and I didn't bother to update my NaNo account when I did add things. I tried writing Friday after shopping, but I was behind, and I did not think I would make it. I was ready to give up, but I decided to try, and I prayed to God for help, and I think He's the only reason I made it.
Yesterday I added some and updated the word count for 5,000 or so words I had written. Things shot up the last two days.
I did not sleep at all last night. I wrote about 10,000 or so words throughout the night. Then I got to the last chapter, needing only a little over 3,000 words. I couldn't write much before church. In the early hours of the morning, most of my word left me. After church, I took a nap, and I meant to sleep only for 4 hours, but I ended up sleeping until 5. When I woke up, I was able to write for a couple more hours to get to 50,094. I wrote a little more than 13,000 words through the night and this evening.
My novel started off as a nice Christmas fic. I have an idea about what my ideal Christmas would be, so I thought that would be a nice novel to write: it'd be happy, get me in the Christmas spirit, and I wouldn't care about adding filler to it. Halfway through, it turned. It got steadily worse, and at the end, it's nearly downright depressing—to me it's depressing, but that's because I killed off someone, and I want to bring him back. ^_~
ederyn and cozzybob should recognize the main characters' names (should they read this post and my novel). That scene with the babies that ederyn loves so much happens in my novel's prequel. As silly as this novel was supposed to be, I'm now thinking about writing a novel for the events that happen before it, and I'm also thinking of writing a sequel one (partly because of the maybe dead guy...).
The novel as it is needs serious work. It's kind of fantasy, but the characters are celebrating Christmas, and there are probably references to our world that should not be in there, but I didn't have time to care. XD The characters are supposed to be all elves (or mostly elves), but reading it, you wouldn't know it. I thought about making it where the elves are Santa's elves and there's a war and stuff going on up in the North Pole, but I never added that part, so they aren't really elves or in the North Pole—those were just things in my head.
Anyway, the novel needs work to make out the references, and I don't want to think about how many typing, spelling, and grammar errors there may be. I know there are probably continuity errors, though I kept a timeline to try to help with that. I also had the first half not foreshadow the second half at all, so I would like to merge the two together to show that some of the things that happen in the second half were the characters' minds in the first half.
I have a text file of my novel, so if anyone should want to read it in its roughest form, let me know! I'll e-mail it to you, but just know you'll cringe. ^_^ Since WriteMonkey doesn't let me italicize one word, I have use the following: *italics* and _underline_. I should have used *italic/* and _underline/_ so that I could have at least used the search and replace later for HTML tags, but I thought of it too late.
Things I learned from NaNo? NaNo is evil, but when you've won it, it doesn't seem too evil. I can get a novel written (whether it's good or not is another thing). I don't need a writing buddy, which is good as I've been abandoned by cozzybob. ^_~ /teasing No matter how busy I may be, that is no excuse not to write; I can always make time. 1,000 words per day is the pace I should be at for a novel I'm not trying to write in a month. My word pace for November was 2,000 words/day so that I would finish on the 25th (you see how well it worked), and while I made it to NaNo, I think 1,000 words/day is the pace I need for my "real" novel.
While I don't need a writing buddy, I still think I want one, but we'll see. There are probably other lessons I learned, but I can't think of them. I've babbled way too much already, and you're either ignoring me or if you've made it this far, you're wanting me to shut up. ^^
How did the rest of you participating fare? Learn anything? Whether you've done/you're doing NaNo, how is your novel(s) coming along? You may hear more from me soon on how novel(s) is/are coming.