It was with a deep sigh of relief that I submitted my draft for the final word count and read the congratulatory message from the folks at NaNoWriMo central. This was the first time the outcome was in doubt since the first year I did National Novel Writing Month, a lifetime ago. (Literally — I was an Engineer homeowner in Southern California then. Proof that there is such a thing as reincarnation.)
My plan was to publish it as a blog, and let people stumble across it and interact with it, allowing it to grow. The first thing I realized was that 50,000 words in a month is way, way, too much for a blog, and trying to develop all the themes simultaneously so they could reach conclusions in a month was just plain crazy. So I kept writing at the same pace, but posting at a more human-digestable rate. Then, I ran out of story at around 40K. I had tried to scope the project so it could be told in 50,000 words, but at 80% of the target I was just fiddling with pieces, starting to get repetitious, (not that this or almost any other blog isn’t, but this blog has no pretense of being literature), and I had said all that I had set out to say. I had a couple of thousand words to go to wrap things up, which I just couldn’t keep from being maudlin no matter how hard I tried.
Finally I sat down and spent a day writing an 8000-word subplot in a completely different style, that the world will never see.
I haven’t posted much on the other blog recently; to be honest after pulling my hair out over the thing these last weeks I’m pretty sick of it. This evening I’ll do a bit of recreational writing before getting back to work in December.
