Nanowrimo Completion and What’s Next!

I just wanted to share real quick about how I did on Nanowrimo this year, and what my next goals are for this novel!

Now, for those of you who don’t know what nanowrimo is – it’s “National Novel Writing Month”, in which, for the month of November, people all around the world sign up to write a novel that’s 50,000 words. Pretty intense, eh? I started doing it back in 2012, I believe, but this was the first year that I won! Granted, if you’ve been following me here on SGL, you’ll know that I didn’t start out from scratch but rather took the month to go through and edit my novel that I’ve been working on for three years.

In the first few weeks, I did a quick edit and then went back again and filled in more holes and answered my own questions that I had. Looking back, I wish I would have gone through it a little slower but I was so excited!

In order to count my words in a fair way, I did a bit of research, and learned that 1 hour of editing = 1,000 words, so I stuck to that until after I’d done the bulk of editing. Once the actual writing began again, the word count moved so slow! But, I hit 50,000 on the 18th, then decided to set a goal of 60,000 for the rest of the month. And guess what, I did it! I just squeaked by on the evening of the 30th and was so relieved that I didn’t work on it again for a few days. But, now I’m trying to get back in the groove of writing every day.

I signed up for a Plotting Workshop by Shaunta Grimes (she’s the lead of the encouraging/positive/helpful writing group I’m in on Facebook, Ninja Writers) and because it’s so FUN, I started plotting my second book the end of last week! I’m so very excited for it – I already know some of the elements that I’m going to carry over from my first one. *giggle*.  It’s going to be a bit off of the first one (the one I’m currently editing), the main character being a side character in the first one. Hopefully that made sense…

But, before I get too carried away with plotting, I’m making sure I edit beforehand. I’ve given myself a goal of having it ready to send out to a few beta readers come the new year. Which means, I’ve really got to get crackin!

I’m off to write my little heart out but come back on Friday for a Short Story Sharing post!

Laura

Did you do Nanowrimo? I’d love to hear how you did!

Tags: nano 2016, nanowrimo, ninja writers, plotting workshop, writing, writing a novel in 30 days