It’s the last day of November, and that means the end of NaNoWriMo!  I’m happy to report a very successful NaNoWriMo this year.  I actually passed 50,000 words on November 26th, and managed to make it to 60,000 words today, for a final total of 60,417.

I really wanted to get as much of the story written as I could while I had good momentum going.  I probably need around 10,000 words more to get to the end of the story, so I plan to continue in the first part of December.  At a slower pace, though!

I’ve really enjoyed writing this one all through the month.  I hit some walls around the 3/4 mark, which I hear is common – it’s when the story needs to stop expanding and start contracting down towards the end, and pay-off all the things that have been set up along the way.  It’s a change of focus so it’s a bit of a bump, but I had a couple scenes I was excited to write that helped me make the shift.  I have a couple more scenes coming up now that I’m excited about, so I hope that will help me keep up momentum even though we’re past NaNoWriMo now.

I have a few more books in this series to finalize before this new one will be going out into the world, but in the meantime, here’s an excerpt…

Rose stared across the length of the long lawn, heart pounding in her chest, and felt time double-back on itself.  Surely she wasn’t now, surely she was having some hazy hallucination of then – but the shouting council members, the lurching ground, Elena’s wide-eyed gaze all felt too real, too present.

Which did not explain what she was seeing across the lawn.

A wall of thorns was growing.  Stalks were springing up out of the ground, putting out branches, growing and doubling and expanding at a visible rate.  They stretched along the edge of the lawn and out of sight, surely wrapping their way around the perimeter of the castle.  The branches were brown and gnarled, not a softening leaf or flower in sight.  She couldn’t see thorns from here, but she knew, deep down inside, that they were there.