…me!  Just over fifty-one thousand words in thirty days.  NaNoWriMo is complete with hours to spare.  Hours.  Woo hoo!

And now for the editing.  Oh, the editing…

So tonight I finally crossed the halfway mark in NaNoWriMo, right on track for the month.  However, it took a valiant effort today because I was behind.  I didn’t write at all last Thursday because of work, Friday I didn’t quite hit my daily goal, and yesterday I only wrote a few words because I was being lazy.

All of that added up to a goal today of 5510 to stay on track.  Yeah, over five thousand words.  Today.  Holy crap it adds up in a hurry.

I made it.  It took most of the day, but I did it.  I demolished my goal.*  How did I do it?  Blood, sweat, and tears.  Or maybe just diligence.  One of the two, for sure.

Like the Nike ad, the best advice is Just Do It.  I didn’t really want to write five thousand words today.  I’m in the middle of the book.  My characters are dumb.  The plot is going nowhere.  All I’m writing is dialog, which I hate with a fiery passion.

None of that matters.  What matters is that I’m doing it.  I’m writing and I’m forcing myself–for the most part–to stay on track.  I will win this year, if I have to drag my novel, kicking and screaming, across the line.  It may come to that.

*Okay,  I wrote 5614.  Not exactly a huge jump over 5510 but I’ll take what I can get.

Dustin and I dressed up for a NaNoWriMo midnight write-in as “The Doctors Horrible.”  Yes, we both dressed up as Dr. Horrible for Halloween.  I made the coats and we bought the rest at Harbor Freight.  We couldn’t find white rubber boots so we did without.

It turned out pretty good except that the vast majority of people we talked to during the day didn’t get the reference.   “Dr. Who?”  “No, Dr. Horrible.  Yes, it has Doogie Howser in it.  Yes, it’s funny, I promise.”

The write-in was at Dragon’s Lair, a local comic book/game store and I’m happy to report that the people there are much cooler (they recognized us).  These are my people.  :)

A pic:

The Doctors Horrible

You’ll notice that I’m missing the pocket.  I made it, I was just too lazy to sew it on last minute.

If you haven’t signed up for NaNoWriMo yet, there’s still time.  You have all of today to procrastinate, but tomorrow is time to buckle down and get started.  So far I have three different story ideas calling to me, but they are just that–ideas.  No plot, no outlines, no character sketches, just three different ideas knocking around in my head.

I made it!  Thirty days, thirty pieces of writing created from a prompt of three words.  Some I liked, some I didn’t, but I made it through and that was the goal.  I ended up creating more words than I would need. Here are the unused words:

ocean, woman, man, hatred, trails, mountain, shoelaces, tree, summer, Japan, lottery, gravy, plaza, duplicate, pants

I’m considering continuing with some sort of daily writing exercise, so let me know if you enjoyed this month-long peek inside my brain.

Now I’m gearing up for NaNo because November 1 is just two weeks from today.  I still don’t have any solid idea of what I’m going to write.  A couple of the story snippets I posted for the days of genius really appealed to me, so I might use them in the novel.  Or I could always write a sequel to last year’s novel.  Either way, I’m sure that on November 1, I’ll be writing something.

I’m thinking about posting my NaNo novel as I write it, but I’m not sure I’m that brave.   After all, the order of the day for NaNo is velocity, and the novel I wrote last year is in pretty bad shape.  A few hundred words a day with each day being unrelated is one thing, but nearly 2,000 words a day that are supposed to form a cohesive novel is something entirely different.