I Won!

The title of this post pretty much says it all: I won NaNoWriMo once again this year!

This year went a lot differently from last year.  Last year I had written 50,000 words on November 24th.  This time around it took me right until today, the 30th, to break that benchmark.  I fell behind twice over the last month, first when I needed a break, and then again when I went to Montreal for about a week.  But that didn’t matter; I still managed to write my 50,000th word before the end of the month, which is what really matters to me.  I won!

The last week and a half has been pretty crazy.  I needed to start wrapping things in the story up but I was afraid I’d started too soon.  So right now, at 50,105 words, the story is not quite finished.  I’m going to spend a bit of time when I’m done writing this post finishing things off.

Another highlight to my last two weeks was when I actually ended up with two Chapter 27’s.  I started the first one but it wasn’t really working out, so I started again, leaving the original one because some of the dialogue was good.  It turns out it’s a good thing I kept it; as I was travelling home from Montreal I started planning revisions and realized I would need some of that dialogue.

This story has been a great experience for me.  For one thing, it’s a zombie story, which is a genre I’ve never attempted before.  For another thing, it was more planned out than last year’s story was.  Last year I ended up with two plots mashed together which really didn’t belong together; it worked for NaNoWriMo, but it will be difficult to untangle them, should I ever do so.  This year there is one solid plot which is going to be much easier to revise.  And as I’ve already mentioned, I do have revision plans.  I’ll be taking a break from this story for most likely the next month, but I have every intention of coming back to it.

As to the ending, that’s going to be another thing that will need to be revised.  I’ve made it here, to the end of the story, and it’s worked out alright for NaNoWriMo.  But I’m not convinced that this ending is the real ending to the story, so that’s something I will have to re-examine when I start the revisions (and when I’m less worried about hitting the word count).  But for now, I’m just excited that I made it to the end of this draft.

Congratulations to everyone else who has won this year’s NaNoWriMo.  If you haven’t quite made it yet, you’ve still got a few hours left – good luck, and congratulations on all the words you’ve already written!

Advertisement