It doesn’t get much sexier than that, does it?
Whoah.
As you can tell from my “most recent” post, November was kind of an intense thirty days. I literally haven’t blogged anything for this page in over a month. Yikes.
It was totally worth it, though.
I can’t believe I pulled it off, but I successfully cranked out 50,000 words of a novel in thirty days. The story itself isn’t finished, but by the time I hit the 50k, I needed a break. I’m going to let the story marinate for a little while, and give my brain some time off. I think, toward the end there, I was just pushing myself so hard to crank out the words that they’re probably not the best few thousand that I’ve written.
That’s okay, though. This whole challenge ended up being so, so good for me in so many ways. First of all, getting that little idea for a story out of my head and onto the page felt like I had freed up this chunk of my mind that was holding on, super-tight-like, to that little idea, trying not to forget what I had already conjured up. Now, it’s on paper (screen, rather), and I’ve got more room to flesh out the story and come up with more blog posts.
It’s also given me a huge long-term goal.
See, the thing about me is that I have a very long history of starting things and not finishing them. Generally, this is in reference to exercise programs, but other areas of my life suffer from it as well. Last year, I spray painted about 16 picture frames various shades of brown, and I’m pretty sure that only 7 of them have pictures in them. 3 of those 7 are actually on the walls. This, however, is something that I put more than two hours of my life into. I didn’t keep track of the actual time I spent on writing last month, but I do know that I wrote over 100 pages-worth of story, and that’s about 88 more pages that I’ve ever written in general. I sacrificed quite a bit of snuggling time with Paul, and when your grad-school-family is plugging through the second half of the semester, snuggle time is kind of a big deal.
If any of my fellow NaNoWriMo participators are reading this, I’d love to know how you keep yourselves motivated to do the revisions upon revisions that are required of making a novel that isn’t terrible. My plan (after giving myself the months of December and January for baby-ness) is to give myself a 10,000 word a month goal. If I did 50,000 in one month, I can totally handle 10,000… whether it’s actual writing or revising.
I often find that it’s better to think realistically, but sometimes you’ve got to dream, you know? Can you imagine actually writing a book that gets published and makes money? If I could bring extra support for my family, using the characters that have been living inside my head… jeeze, that would be so, so sweet.
Anyway, on the last night of November, Paul went out and bought me a bottle of sparkling grape juice and a bar of Godiva milk chocolate to celebrate. Yeah, Paul’s pretty awesome.
He kept telling me I was going to spill my “bubbly,” and apparently he wasn’t kidding.
Here’s to accomplishing goals and letting ourselves dream a little!
