I Did It!

This was my first year doing NaNoWriMo. Earlier this year I finished my first novel, an urban fantasy that took me three months for the first draft and is currently on its sixth (and final?) polished draft to get ready for agent querying.

Since that project was out of the way, and I had a novella idea I wanted to try, I decided to use the structure of NaNoWriMo to get a daily wordcount. I was shooting for 30,000...but as of last night at 12:52am I HAVE FINISHED NATIONAL NOVEL WRITING MONTH AS A WINNER!

Open Office says 51,414 and NaNo's site verification says 50,122. (Really don't like the discrepancy, grrr.) Either way, I'm a winner!

I still have about 8 more outline points to go (so, 14,000 words?) and then I'll be truly done with the first draft. Then its onwards to redrafting, critiques, editing, round and round until a final draft can be accomplished. I'm very happy to have succeeded in my first NaNoWriMo ever. This was fun!

Also this week, I've won two query critiques from published authors (one of which goes up today for comment) and a synopsis critique from an agent (so I need to get that polished and out the door). There are two agent pitch sessions tomorrow and Friday as well. It's a full, fun writing week!

Congratulations!

I had a lot of fun this year too. It was also my first time, and I chose to rewrite an old favorite of mine that needed a lot of work (plot=good; dialogue/characterization=bad). This edition is much longer, so I'm far from done, but I think we both can definitely finish. Good luck with everything, and maybe we'll be reading each other's work soon^^

*covers you in awesomesauce* That is fabulous! Congrates!

I had that problem with Open Office as well. I had to write an extra thousand pages of my book to get to 50k last night. This is my first time writing something this size and I'm about halfway done with my outline so far. The action is just now picking up in the book. Actually wrote a pretty awkward scene I might scrap all together to get to 50K I have to look over that when I return to the book..

Open Office counts opening "curly" or "smart" quotes as words. It's a notorious bug in that program. It can really throw off your word count, especially if you have a lot of dialogue.