NaNo Was No Turkey


Pink Think: “I am thankful…to God for each story, each idea, each word, each day.” – Isaac Bashevis Singer

original art from Rocky Point PARP

Midway through NaNoWriMo and feeling good. Though not in the way I expected.

I signed up for National Novel Writing Month with a 50k word goal by month’s end. Or more like – I didn’t take my name off the website so I was unofficially in the running. Started with a fun story which fizzled about 5,000 words in.

But all was not lost!

Thanks to the writing habit that got me motivated again, I picked up a Work In Progress that I abandoned over the summer and am writing again. Every day except for Sunday. I look forward to it. Most days I cannot wait to get back to it. I am in love with the main characters and I just sit there letting them tell me the story. I kind of know where the story is heading, but I am as surprised myself with the twists and turns.

One thing different about this project (historical women’s fiction)is I have been writing from different points of view, and it’s so interesting. Sometimes I think “but is that realistic to the time period?” and I beat back that inner editor and just keep writing. There will be time to fix things later.

I am not as concerned about word count, though for the record, I am nearly 30k into this manuscript. My goal is 80k just so it’s more commercially viable, but I plan to just keep writing the story, and then fill in the gaps if it ends up short of my goal.

As long as I have a forward momentum, I am happy. And not only that, I am actually getting sleep! Well, most days I get reasonable amount of sleep. I used to push myself by writing until I was cross-eyed and the morning after was ugly in terms of my manuscript and in terms of my disposition.

My recent guilty pleasure has been to turn on the radio in my bedroom when everyone is gone and play Christmas music (my husband has this thing about not doing Christmas until day after Thanksgiving). So I do have to turn it off when I am writing scenes set in February in the Philippines.

I feel like I am walking around in a good fog…making my list for Thanksgiving dinner which I am hosting while thinking of how to get my protagonist in and out of trouble.

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Happy Thanksgiving to you all!! I am grateful for each and everyone of you bloggy friends!