I have been decidedly absent from this blog for the last few weeks, because I’ve been deep into my NaNo novel.  And now on the last day of the month, I’m delighted to report I crossed into the winner’s circle! 🙂

I actually hit 50,000, the official NaNo goal, on Monday, Nov 24th.  I promptly went into the “50K Slump” (it’s a Thing on the NaNo forums) and my characters have not been interested in playing with me for the rest of the week…but I dragged them along through a few plot points and another 10,000 words anyway, to reach my personal goal of 60,000 this morning.  That just leaves (hopefully!) 15,000 words to write in December to complete the first draft of the novel.

Despite some feet-dragging from my characters, they have mostly been very cooperative to run along with me this month, and I think I have most of the plot figured out.  I don’t know exactly how the final showdown will play out, but I at least have a pretty good idea how to get there…and I can figure out the rest when we’re there!

I’ve written a LOT of sentences in the last few weeks, so how about some bullet points to sum up the process? 🙂

Some Numbers…

• Total Words: 60,290 (in Word) or 60,060 (in NaNo’s validator)
• Highest Daily Word Count: 3,187
• Lowest Daily Word Count: 814
• New Characters Invented: 18 (plus 2 we’ve seen in other books)
• Deaths: 4 (but only 1 “on-screen”)
• Wishes Gone Awry: 5 (and 3 that worked pretty well)
• Total Times Karina Threatened Someone with a Knife: 6 (she wasn’t always serious…)
• Total Magical Items Forrest Knitted: 4

And Some Most/Best Of/Favorites…

• Most Surprising Scene: I did not anticipate writing a knife fight.  Or Karina’s reaction when I rather callously killed one of her friends in said-knife fight.
• Hardest Scene to Write: Right around 50K (of course!) I needed Karina to stow aboard a ship to escape town.  For no good reason, the scene just would not work with me.  I also suspect we suddenly jumped from vaguely-Medieval to Napoleonic Era, so I may need to do some ship research in revisions!  And speaking of that…
• Randomest Thing I Researched: The Latin term for gold.  I also need to research exactly how a person dies while being hanged (suffocating, but how does that actually work?) but didn’t have time and wrote past that scene for now (for the squeamish–no one actually dies by hanging, it’s just a near-thing…)
• Favorite Unexpected Idea: A toss-up on that one.  I was a few days into November before I figured out how to drag the Brothers Grimm in, and now I’m excited about the wishes that create fairy tale-type effects (like the chickens laying gilded eggs, the boots that turn into glass, and the vegetable garden gone wild, with a particularly large pumpkin).  I was a couple weeks into November before it occurred to me that I could tie the cursed forest in The Storyteller and Her Sisters into this novel, and that makes me happy too.
• Favorite Inside Reference: I named a tavern The Black Lion after a pub in London, which is very near Kensington Gardens and I’m convinced J. M. Barrie must have eaten there some time.  And I also had fish and chips there once.
• Favorite Line: For right now at least, let’s go with… “I like horses.  They don’t say stupid things.”  Which is better in context, because Karina is saying it to Forrest, right after he said something…unwise.

All in all, NaNo has been hugely fun.  🙂  A little exhausting–but hugely fun!