Wednesday, May 1, 2019

The Morning After

It’s May 1, and NaNoWriMo’s April Camp session is over. The good thing about NaNoWriMo is that you don’t answer to anyone except yourself. For me, that’s also the bad thing.

I started the month with a goal of 30 thousand new words, enough, when added to the existing draft’s word count, to push it to the 50 thousand words considered to be a novel. Half way through the month, I reduced my goal to 15 thousand. I wanted a Winner badge on my Profile page even if I didn’t reach my true goal of finishing the draft. Yesterday, I felt like I’d “sold out.”

During April, I restructured and revised the existing draft to reflect the addition of a major conflict the detective faces while out of his jurisdiction; wrote over 15 thousand new words for the current story; and wrote several thousand more words developing the plot for a future book in the series. Yesterday, I felt like shrugging my shoulders and saying “Oh, well,” but today I’ve given myself permission to write slowly and be proud of what I accomplish.