Wednesday, December 3, 2014

I Won #NaNoWriMo

Hey guys, guess what? I won National Novel Writing Month!

Yes, I wrote 50,000 words in the month of November. It was both easier and harder than I thought it would be, in different ways. It was easy to write that much, because I write pretty fast anyway, and had already outlined the story extensively, but it was hard to write that much without editing. I ended up getting to a point where I knew I would have to go back and change major plot things, but I had to keep going, because I was behind. 

I learned a lot about my process during the month--namely that I can't not edit while writing. I can't turn off my internal editor, and that's not a bad thing. It makes my prose pretty workable by the time I get done with a chapter, but it also makes writing a chapter take a little longer. When I was completely focused on writing during November, that wasn't that big of a deal, and I could more or less churn out a chapter every three to five days or so. But now that I have to work on other things, such as my music, college preparation, and other projects, I'm not going to be able to finish chapters as frequently. But that's okay. It works.

As people have been reading along online and critiquing To Look Skyward, I've caught a lot of things that I need to fix. Unfortunately, I need to keep this book plodding slowly forward, so I don't get stuck in an eternal rewrite. That means I'm going to have to ignore the glaring mistakes and focus on making the next parts of the book better. I can come back and fix everything in a second draft. So, off I go! Wish me luck. 50,000 words down, lots more to go. This is definitely going to be a thick book. But it is an epic fantasy... So there's that.

No comments:

Post a Comment