Writing in the morning; writing in the evening; a lot of shopping in between. That was Day 17 of NaNoWriMo. Something I’ve done before, but first time this month of writing.
Today is Day 18, and I’m just about to the finish line.
Whereas the night before the words struggled to get out, last night I found it necessary to shut down after finishing the current chapters. I ended up a couple of hundred words short of three thousand for the day, and I could have written more, but I’ve been pushing it hard for a couple of days, working through something that was kicking my butt, and I didn’t want to get into a chapter, then shut down a couple of hundred words in before heading to bed.
Why mess up a good thing?
That’s why this morning finds me thirty-two hundred words short of fifty thousand, and one of the finish lines is in sight. I stated a long time a go that NaNo is a marathon, where you keep a steady pace and don’t worry about sprinting your way across twenty-six miles of copy.
When you hold it up to that light, then you can say: the end of your story is the finish line, and the fifty thousand point is the wall that some runners hit.
It’s a very rare occasion–at least to my way of thinking–that when you write fifty thousand, and some plus, for NaNo, that’s it: you are through with your novel. I don’t mean through as in “I’ll never have to edit this sucker and make it presentable,” I mean through as in, “That’s it: The End, put this damn thing to bed for a while.” You’re going to go a little beyond the Fifties to get to the Endies, and that’s where the Wall is gonna come in.
Something like this happened last year. I stared out, but before I started writing, I knew I’d venture beyond fifty thousand. I figured, at first, maybe sixty-five, maybe seventy thousand, but not much beyond that. Then once I was through with Part One, I was thinking, “Oh, this will be seventy-thousand,” and it wasn’t long before I knew the novel was going to hit eighty thousand . . .
At the end of Day 17, I was a little over sixty-one thousand words into the novel, and would end up writing another twenty-five thousand in the next eight days. By the time I was into the last few chapters, I wanted it over. Sure, I’m like that with every story–I want to write “The End” and go off and do something else–but reaching the end of Demonic Majesty was a trial. I made it though, but it wasn’t the easiest things I’d done.
This time–not so much. I’ve written far more in the last year before this NaNo than I had before doing Her Demonic Majesty. That was the first real novel I’d not only written, but completed, and the experience taught me quite a lot. This time around, there have been a few bumps in the path, but nothing that I haven’t be able to work though.
The end is near . . . but the moment has been prepared for.
And I didn’t have to fall off a radio telescope to learn that.
