Put A Fork In It – It’s Done!

Greetings from NaNo Land, that bizarre and unforgiving place where tens of thousands of writers across the world are frantically trying to finish their 50,000-word novels, written in the month of November. These are, as they say, the worst of times, when writers desperately throw everything they have into the end of their drafts including a recitation of a passage in World and Peace or a transcript of an Oprah show that changed their main character’s life. Last year, I’m pretty sure I typed blah-blah-blah for two straight pages before the words started forming into sentences again.

For this year’s National Novel Writing Month, I focused on the second draft of my current novel project. This meant taking a chapter from the first draft, chopping it to pieces, and then taping it back together again.

This morning I decided to count up all of the words I’ve written on this project. Here’s the thing — I’m only counting the words that made it into the computer. Because I write long-hand first in various notebooks lying around the house, the car, and my purse, there are plenty of uncounted words on the cutting room floor.

Final tally? 84,700 words. Yeesh.

For NaNo, I have my 50,000. They are neither good nor ready for public consumption but they are written and I am done, done, done. And now I think I’ll go take a shower.