Winners, Losers and that Post-NaNo Feel.

Okay, so I disappeared for a while. Sorry about that. Between exams and moving back home for the summer and job hunting and NaNo guilt, blogging fell to the back of my agenda. But now I am back and have a few free moments to blog. Yay!

First, my final update for NaNoWriMo 2013. All through the process I said how surprised I was to get as far as I had. And I was. I fully expected to nit even last the week. Instead, I lasted three weeks and while I may not have ‘won’ NaNo in the traditional sense, by my own standards, I did win because I went far beyond my own expectations. I ended up with a total of 30,897 words about 25,000 more than I thought considering it took me seven and a half years to finish the first draft of my first novel, Queen of Hearts (six months of which was a complete rewrite). My greatest day of writing was the 10th November when I wrote 3,188 words in one sitting. And despite not writing every day for the entire month, I thought about my world every day, about its institutions, geography, history, language, the interconnections of a hundred minor characters who emerged and demanded their own tales be told. NaNoWriMo 2013 taught me that I am capable of writing more than I believe and to fall back in love with the world I created even if all I have to show for my efforts is a steaming pile of lacklustre nothing, and there is perhaps hidden within it a diamond in the rough. You can see my stats breakdown here.

Second, my plan for the summer. I have three months until I return to uni and heaps to do before then. If, that is, I can bear to be inside tapping away at my computer instead of out in the sunshine.

To do before summer ends:

1. Edit Queen of Hearts (adding in a few more scenes, plot devices, etc and sharpening up the prose in time for beta readers to take charge in March or April.

2. Finish first draft of Rebellion Rising (and come up with a better title). This has been sitting abandoned for over 18 months now because it has a certain voice which I love but feel that I have lost and I do not want to add anything to it which might compromise what I’ve already written. I seriously need to get over this because it has been stuck smack bang in the middle of a scene since I realised a small plot hole (which I may have fixed? I really need to gather my notes somewhere solid instead of all over the place on scraps of paper. Maybe then I would have a better idea of what I’m doing!).

3. Write a short story every fortnight. Experiment with different genres.

4. What I really, really want to do, especially after studying some linguistics this semester but what will entirely derail plans 1-3 just because of how much time I would spend on it, systematically create, further and fix my language. Maybe make a new one. Who knows? 😀

So that’s all from me today. It always astounds me how I can write so much on a  blog and yet when there is something I need to be writing I cannot build up the word count for love of god nor money. Oh well.