NaNoWriMo: Final Thoughts
I finished! 50,250 words at final count. Woohoo!
Now, I do feel like I cheated slightly by changing projects 2/3 of the way through, but oh well. The goal is to write 50,000 words, and at least I did that. Switching to work on the sequel to "Thicker than Water" turned out to be pretty awesome. I was worried that it would be too dark, since I'd been working on "Tangle" and that had gone pretty far down the rabbit hole without a flashlight, but it turns out I didn't need to worry. The stuff I wrote for "Thinner than Smoke" was, in my humble opinion, hilarious. My characters are trying to escape from soldiers who want to capture them, which seems like it would be pretty harrowing, but it actually came out funny. The characters (one male, one female) end up borrowing clothes from a prostitute so they can blend in (since the soldiers are looking for at least one man), and they have to pretend to be lesbians to avoid notice.
So, yeah, as a bisexual writer, this was a fun scene.
The downside to working on NaNoWriMo, of course, is that everything else falls by the wayside. I fell pretty far behind on some work for an online class, so now I have to scramble to make it up at the end of the semester. I had a lot of late nights, where I just didn't have time to write my 1,700 words during the day and had to make it up after 11 pm. I've been very, very tired. As the writing turned from fun to work (as "Tangle" got increasingly dark), I started wanting to spend more time on other fun activities, like playing video games with my husband, and that in turn made me spend less time on things like homework and research. I think most of my problem was that I'm not very good at managing my time. You'd think that I'd know how to do that by now, but I guess not.
Going forward, I'm going to continue to focus on "Thinner than Smoke." "Tangle" clearly needs more time to sit in my brain, unless I want to make it end up like an Ellen Hopkins book. I'm not nice to my characters, but I don't think I can go that far. I have a lot of ideas for "Thinner than Smoke" that I'm looking forward to working on at my own pace, when I want to!
Now, I do feel like I cheated slightly by changing projects 2/3 of the way through, but oh well. The goal is to write 50,000 words, and at least I did that. Switching to work on the sequel to "Thicker than Water" turned out to be pretty awesome. I was worried that it would be too dark, since I'd been working on "Tangle" and that had gone pretty far down the rabbit hole without a flashlight, but it turns out I didn't need to worry. The stuff I wrote for "Thinner than Smoke" was, in my humble opinion, hilarious. My characters are trying to escape from soldiers who want to capture them, which seems like it would be pretty harrowing, but it actually came out funny. The characters (one male, one female) end up borrowing clothes from a prostitute so they can blend in (since the soldiers are looking for at least one man), and they have to pretend to be lesbians to avoid notice.
So, yeah, as a bisexual writer, this was a fun scene.
The downside to working on NaNoWriMo, of course, is that everything else falls by the wayside. I fell pretty far behind on some work for an online class, so now I have to scramble to make it up at the end of the semester. I had a lot of late nights, where I just didn't have time to write my 1,700 words during the day and had to make it up after 11 pm. I've been very, very tired. As the writing turned from fun to work (as "Tangle" got increasingly dark), I started wanting to spend more time on other fun activities, like playing video games with my husband, and that in turn made me spend less time on things like homework and research. I think most of my problem was that I'm not very good at managing my time. You'd think that I'd know how to do that by now, but I guess not.
Going forward, I'm going to continue to focus on "Thinner than Smoke." "Tangle" clearly needs more time to sit in my brain, unless I want to make it end up like an Ellen Hopkins book. I'm not nice to my characters, but I don't think I can go that far. I have a lot of ideas for "Thinner than Smoke" that I'm looking forward to working on at my own pace, when I want to!
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