NaNoWriMo 2008... Mission Accomplished!

Now that December is here and NaNoWriMo 2008 is over I can happily announce that I was able to complete my novel by the end of November. In fact I was able to write "THE END" on the afternoon of the 29th, with a final word count of 70,028.

This has been a wonderful experience. I drank large amounts of coffee and listened to hours of music as I wrote. I am still shocked at how many words I was able to write in such a short time. My previous best was the 40,000 word novella that I wrote over a 4-5 year time span. Now in 29 days I wrote more than one and a half times that amount!

I did not have the entire novel mapped out when I started. I had a "Luke Skywalker finds out his father was a Jedi knight when his aunt and uncle are killed, so he leaves with Ben Kenobi to fight the Empire and Darth Vader, and in the end blows up a moon that is really a space station" kind of plot summary in mind before I started. I had written a paragraph describing each of the first six chapters, but the rest just came as I pressed keys on my keyboard.

I have learned some great lessons from NaNoWriMo. I now know from personal experience that it is possible to create a long work in a relatively short time. I have learned that if I put a little time into it every day, I can get a lot written. I intend to take both of these lessons with me as I leave NaNoWriMo 2008 behind.

I have taken the last couple of days off of writing, and it has felt strange to not brew a pot of coffee in the morning and write a thousand words or so before my morning shower. I think it won't be long before I'm back at the keyboard writing something new. I've got a backlog of ideas I've accumulated over the years, and now that I know I can get them out of my head relatively quickly my fingers are itching to do so.

My next project is to return to my novella and do some more polishing. My editor tells me I have some chapters to re-write, and I have a couple of ideas of some new places I can take my characters. I suspect when I'm done with that it will pass over the 50,000 word mark and become a novel as well. Once that work is done I will start podcasting it, but that's another blog entry. In a month or two I plan to return to my NaNoWriMo novel to start editing it.

I can easily see participating in NaNoWriMo again, although I'm not sure I'd want to do it every year. I sometimes wonder if this experience was a bit of a fluke, as I didn't have any major writer's block or other work-stopping issues along the way. I just wrote daily and sometimes felt things were going a bit too easy for me. The story seemed to flow from my fingers, and when I was nearing the end of what was in my head the next bit would just come to me when I was in the shower, driving to work, or wherever. Because of that I would like to do NaNoWriMo again some day to see if I can duplicate my success.

But for now I am very happy that I was able to reach safe harbor on the Viking ship that was NaNoWriMo 2008. If nothing else I'll be able to tell my grandchildren some day that I wrote a complete novel in a month, and then I'll slip out my false teeth and scare them half to death. I can hardly wait.