I passed 50,000 words on my NaNo novel today, on the last day of November.  It was 50,070 according to NaNo’s word count validator, or 50,319 if you want to believe Microsoft Word.  Either way, pretty exciting!  After my big push a few days ago, I’ve been able to keep ahead of the goal, so I actually didn’t need to write too much on this last day–which made for a more relaxed end to the month.

Of course, it’s all rather artificial too–I’m already making plans for how I’m going to write 25,000 words in December, which should take me to the actual end of my first draft.  I’ve only just reached the final section; as I’ve mentioned, this story is actually a companion piece to my other main project right now, and I just introduced my main characters from that story into this one, literally in the last two paragraphs as I passed the 50,000 word goal.  So there are still fun writing times ahead!  And after this, writing only half as much each day should be easy…right?

Well, we’ll see!  I have to actually get back to the rest of my life now.  I kept up with my job and my social life in November, but anything else creative went on the backburner (any non-NaNo blog posts you read this month?  Wrote those in October).  There are penpals to email, blog posts to write, Challenge books to read, neglected blogs to follow…

But it’s definitely been worth it for the past month.  I have so enjoyed NaNo, and barring major life circumstance changes, I’m doing this again next year!  I loved the community aspect of it the most.  It was so much fun to know there were many other people writing this month too, and to interact with them on the NaNo forums.

And I loved spending so much time on my writing.  There were ups and downs to writing this quickly.  I don’t think I know Lyra and Dastan as well as I know, say, Julie and Jasper, who I’ve spent the last year and half with.  But by this point, I do know them, and I think I can work some of the thin bits out in the revision.  I found that I wrote much less description and with far less detail when I was writing quickly–another thing to deal with in revision.  But I also found out that I actually can keep coming up with plot and scenes, and that those lightning bolt moments of realization about how a story ought to go really will come when needed, even if I don’t give them a lot of time to arrive.  I think that by the time I finish this, it will be something of reasonable quality–but it’s going to need those revisions!

I’ll see where I am with my other writing projects by November of next year, but I might decide to do something unpublishable and therefore low-pressure: like a fanfiction novel, or a sequel to one of my other books.  Something that I’d write just for the fun of writing, but that I wouldn’t normally want to spend long lengths of time on (see above: unpublishable).  That would make it perfect for the whirlwind writing month of NaNo–I wouldn’t need to spend a lot of time, and I’d come in already knowing my characters.

But that’s a plan for next October.  For now, I am so glad I finally gave NaNo a go, and thank you all for coming along for the ride!

And now Lyra and Dastan are still awaiting their remaining 25,000 words…back to the trenches!

First of all, Happy Thanksgiving!  🙂  Also, this is a bit of a landmark for me–my 200th blog post!

Thursday, not surprisingly, was not a big writing day for me.  I was out of town to visit relatives, but I did bring my laptop and managed almost a thousand words–which put me nearly 600 words behind.  I was kind of worried yesterday afternoon, because I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to write next, I knew I was going to have a couple more days in the next week when I might not be able to write much, and we’re practically to the end of the month!

So I took a walk around my neighborhood.  Walking helps me think out stories.  And I thought up a story for Lyra to tell, and came home and typed away in a flurry of words.  It turned out to be a great story (at least, I think so!) and I had my best NaNo day yet–3,300 words!  Then today Lyra and Dastan had a very big argument which got lots of words out quickly, and Lyra followed it up with another story, a Grimm-retelling laden with angry commentary.  Result: another 3,000 words.

I love having days like this.  🙂  Barring complete disaster in the next four days, I think I’m looking good for 50,000 by the end of the month.

You know what’s ironic, though?  I originally started this novel as a spin-off from my main writing project.  That one is about a wandering adventurer, and one of the adventures he wanders into is the story of the twelve dancing princesses.  So the two novels are meant to overlap–but I’m pretty sure I’m going to finish the month without actually getting to the part that overlaps!  But that’s all right…it gives me plans for December, to actually finish this story that’s definitely going to be longer than 50,000 words.

Excerpt…with a little context: Lyra and Dastan’s argument is because he proposes, but she doesn’t want to get married yet and had thought he understood that.  Afterwards, she tells a couple of her sisters a version of Grimm’s “The Maiden without Hands.”  (I swear it’s a real story, and I didn’t even make up the strangest parts).  This is the end of the story:

            The maiden came to a pear tree and, unable to pick any fruit without any hands, she contrived to eat a single pear as it hung on the branches.  That must have been a very messy business, which may be why she only ate one before retiring to sleep among some bushes.

            The next morning, the king came out to walk in his garden, and noticed that one of his pears was missing.  He decided to hide nearby to see if the thief would return.  That evening, the maiden ventured out to eat another pear, and the king confronted her.

            The maiden told the king her sorrowful tale, and he was so impressed by her beauty and her goodness that he asked her to marry him.  She probably should have been wary of marrying a man who actually kept count of the pears on his tree, but then, she didn’t have many other prospects.  Of course, he didn’t have to propose to her at all; he could have just offered to be good friends and perhaps a bit more without needing to make it all permanent and binding, but no, he felt he needed to get her into some sort of lasting agreement.  So she said yes because she didn’t have the nerve to say no, and they were married.

            The king had a set of silver hands made for her, which sounds pretty but also completely useless and uncomfortable.  He probably meant well, but that’s the worst kind of trouble, when a man means well and then goes striking off in completely the wrong direction without actually knowing what a girl wants.

            According to legend, they lived happily ever after, although you do sort of have to wonder about that kind of legend because life is just so much more complicated than happily ever after would lead you to believe.

            When I finished my commentary-laden telling of “The Maiden without Hands,” Talya cleared her throat awkwardly and said, “So, you’re kind of upset with Dastan?”

It’s been a good two days for moving the contents of the novel forward, although my word count has only been decent.  I’m 150 words behind right now, and it’s just not happening anymore tonight…but I’m hoping to get some good writing time in during the long weekend (at least, the later part), so I should be able to catch up!

Yesterday Lyra and Dastan got their first romantic scene, some 34,000 words in.  For me, that’s early.  I have a tendency to have my leads dance around each other (no pun intended!) for entire novels and finally get together at the end.  A close friend who is usually one of the first to read my novels still hasn’t forgiven me for the couple who didn’t get together until the second-to-last chapter.  Definite romance only halfway through will probably make her happy.  It might make up for the other draft I’m working on, which again holds the romance off until the very end…

So yesterday moved matters forward nicely, despite a last-minute change of setting.  And it turned out Dastan was right, you can’t actually see much from the top of a tower when the surrounding landscape is dark, so an orchard was better…but he could’ve pointed it out to me earlier, you know?

(I think this is a product of the frenetic writing of NaNo–both that the characters seem to be taking control more often than usual, and that I’m looking at it that way.)

Today, I was trying to sort out the next section of plot, and suddenly realized a terrible, dramatic, vitally important matter I have been completely overlooking for the last several months as this story formed in my head–I hadn’t figured out how to bring Jones in!  Regular blog readers know that Jones is my regular character–my clumsy, well-meaning, hopefully endearing man who gets at least a cameo in all of my novels.  He’s my game for regular readers, something to spot in each novel.

Jones already has a life in this universe–he works at an inn that figures prominently in The People the Fairies Forget–so I decided for this story he gets to take a break from helping customers at the inn and have a go at being a champion, trying to rescue the princesses from their supposed curse.  He is remarkably and amazingly ill-suited to being a champion of any sort, which should provide some fun scenes.

How’s about his opening scene as tonight’s excerpt?  A little clarifier–his full name is Richard Samuel Jones, and while he normally goes by Sam, here he’s trying to put on the right image by presenting himself as Sir Richard.  The “Sir” is completely invented, as will be revealed later but I might as well just tell you now!

Our fifty-third champion turned out to be one of my favorites.  Possibly my absolute favorite, depending on how I choose to qualify the last one.  #53 was responsible for one of the very few times I ever laughed during supper with my father.

I saw him for the first time when we came into supper, and he was already sitting at the table by Father.  I classified him as one of the Well-Meaners.  They’re the ones who smile at us when we come in.  The Greed-ers don’t pay much attention to us, and the Cattle-Buyers leer.

#53 smiled, and when everyone did their polite rising to their feet, he tried to too.  Instead, there was a completely spectacular tripping.  I have no idea how a person trips over a chair he’s trying to stand up from, but he managed it.  Then he picked himself up without a trace of embarrassment or any indication that he felt this was out of the ordinary, which was somehow even funnier.

My sisters and I got to our seats with tightly clamped lips and a lot of pink cheeks.  Father, whose mouth may have twitched a little but who mostly maintained his solemnity, introduced #53 as Sir Richard of Ryvideau, and then went through his usual speech about the slippers and proof and so on.

Richard got back into his seat without incident, and food was served.  There were five courses.  He managed to knock over his drink twice (which let me see he was drinking water, so it wasn’t that kind of clumsiness), dropped a chicken leg, and lost three napkins.  He stayed amiable and unperturbed through it all, which made me wonder, first, if this was just normal for him, and second, if so, how he could possibly have ever become a knight.

Tired tonight…

Yesterday was a good day.  We explored the locked room, got into all sorts of character development, and wound up with almost two thousand words written.

Today has involved lots of running about, and for a while there I thought I was only going to get a few hundred words down.  But, I managed some more time and dragged my characters through a couple more scenes (including one scene which probably deserves better and may get it in a revision), to wind up only 96 words behind.  Today, I’m calling that a victory.  Especially because I ended with Lyra starting another story (kind of–I’ve been having her tell backstory like it’s a separate story), and her stories are always good for my word count.  So I’m hopeful for tomorrow.

That’s all I’ve got tonight.  Have a paragraph.

It takes a very special sort of mind to be interested in whether one’s ability to light a candle magically is affected by the waning and waxing of the moon.  Maybe if the candle exploded during the full moon, that would be interesting, but Eleanora never observed any effects so dramatic.

So I guess I got the hang of Thursday after all.  My expected distraction today didn’t develop, and I got a nice 1,733 words written.  Which would be excellent–but it turned out that it was yesterday I couldn’t get anything done!  Fortunately, I had that big cushion built up, so I finish out today 174 words behind the goal.  That’s a paragraph or two; I can deal with that.

It’s a funny thing about those word-count cushions.  You build what seems like a nice big one, a thousand words or so ahead of the game and the chart looks so pretty with the “written” line up above the “target” line…and then one slow day knocks it all out.  I was out most of yesterday evening, and I swear I was going to be good and write when I got home…but then I had a package.  And I’m compulsive about packages, they have to be opened, and if it’s something fun…well, it was a new picture, so it had to go on the wall, and by that point I figured Lyra and Dastan could wait until today.

Which they very nicely did, and still showed up to get work done tonight.  And anyway–if I ever got too far ahead, I suspect I’d lose all my motivation.  There wouldn’t be any challenge then!

Tonight’s excerpt:

There are many locked doors in our castle.  We’ve slept behind a locked door every night, for as long as I can remember.  Any doors leading outside are locked.  There are all sorts of spare rooms that are kept under a key.

But the most incontrovertibly locked room, the room that was kept the most inviolate, the most untouched and unvisited, was our mother’s.  It had been locked the day she died and, as far as we knew, it had never been opened.

Mother and Father had always had separate bedrooms; it’s common enough among royalty, although I suppose they must have, you know, visited.  There are twelve of us, after all.  But anyway, Mother had a room that was just hers.  Vira remembers it.  I don’t.

I think we get to visit the locked room tomorrow.  I’m looking forward to it.  🙂