Phew! I made it!

Well, NaNoWriMo 2005 is over, and I won!

Even better, I improved over last year:

1) I hit the 50K 2 days before the deadline

2) I finished the novel ONE word short of my goal of 55K (as opposed to about 1K)

3) I validated the novel before Midnight Eastern time.

It wasn't without its tribulations. The Forum for a while insisted that November had ended at 9:00 Pacific, but they fixed it fairly quickly.

Day 27 was a Good Day

I managed to hit 48K this evening, which now puts me less than 2,000 words to my first goal. Now, making the second goal of 55,000, that seems a bit harder, but we shall see...

I'm also not that far from the end of the novel, so I may actually hit the 50K before I run out of novel this year.

Time to call it a night.

Survived Thanksgiving

Well, I managed to survive another Thanksgiving with my family, but just barely. At least this year, I had a laptop. I set a modest goal while traveling to write a minimum of 1,000 words a day. I carved out small pieces of time, with one long session at the end of the evening, and managed to write no less than 1,800 words a day.

It's funny how motivating the Spreadsheet really is. You can see your progress and think "oh, I just need to type a few more words to hit 1,800" or "Oh, only 15 words and I'll be at 45,000."

It's a little late to start using it this year, but I'll definitely be using it next year. I just hope my hard drive doesn't crash... I just spent a few hours reinstalling a bunch of things on my computer, but the 160 GB drive still has more than 90% free space. Wow!

So anyways, did I mention I gave up on trying for 60K? Well, I'm still going to make a run for 55,000, or at least do more than the 50,014 I did last year. I also decided to change the title of my novel to Blood and Asphalt, which sounds a bit better.

So with that said, I'm at 47K and trying to make 48 tonight....

Nano: The Third Week

Well, I actually attended my first Nano Write-In tonight. The Regional Liason was there, but she left early because she wasn't feeling well. While I was there, I set a goal of spending an hour and a half there, and managed to hit 31K while I was there. The Regional also was handing out presents. She gave me a choice of replica sandals, marbles, or balls. I chose balls because my MC has to have them to be able to deal with vampires all the time. Well, that and he is a guy (where I'm not). I find myself often typing She in relation to the main character, so I guess that means I'm not used to having a male MC)

I also had my computer's hard drive crash this week, but fortunately, the novel is on a portable drive and backed up on a laptop, so it wasn't lost....phew! Another thing I learned: OT and Nano don't mix very well. But by working late, I managed to get out of having to work this weekend, which would have sucked.

But now I can't compare last year's numbers to this year's. Doh.

So...back to novelling.....

Nano: The First Week

Well, I survived the first week of Nanowrimo with most of my sanity still intact. The laptop is definitely helping, as my word counts are up. Here are the current numbers:
2004 2005
11/1 1,136 1,136 1,747 1,747
11/2 2,301 1,165 3,504 1,757
11/3 3,482 1,181 4,806 1,302
11/4 4,714 1,232 6,508 1,702
11/5 6,085 1,371 8,879 2,371
11/6 8,126 2,041 11,634 2,755
11/7 10,137 2,011 13,459 1,825

I will admit, I have spent significantly MORE hours working on it, but heck, I was happy just to hit the 10K Minimum very very early Sunday evening. (And currently, the 10,000th word is accept.) On to 20K!

And for those of you wanting to see the novel in progress, please email me a request for it. I may actually try to get this one published, and if I publish it here, I'm giving away my first publication rights.....