The long (no, not really) wait for Christmas has begun! I’ve been looking forward to this time of the year since July – I just love snow, and winter, and all things Christmassy. Last year I wrote a Christmas calendar (a Christmas-themed story with one chapter every day until Christmas) and I did want to do that again this year, but there simply wasn’t time. I don’t feel too bad about it though since I’ve managed to write a lot of other things, and now I’m going to enjoy the Christmas season as much as I possibly can. Perhaps even read some books, which is something that I really want to do right now!
Month: November 2015
Winner!
I finally reached my goal, and won NaNoWriMo! It feels so good to have done this, and to have proven to myself that I actually can work full time, and still write and get things done. I’ve struggled for so long with balancing work and writing, and now I feel like I know a lot more about myself and how I should plan my free time.
Of course, I hope I can make use of what I’ve learnt this month, and keep on writing every day. But right now, I look forward to enjoying a very lazy weekend. 😉
Finished!
I managed to finish the first draft yesterday, just as planned. It’s the best feeling in the world, to reach your goal, and I’m very happy with how the story turned out! The ending surprised me, and that’s good – I want my writing process to be fun, after all, even though I plot my stories very carefully. Now, I have about 11K of NaNo left and I’ll have to come up with some ideas for short stories. Difficult, yes, but oh so exciting!
Plotting
I’m hoping to finish the last scenes of the novel tonight, but I have a lot of plotting to do to tie all my loose ends together. As you can see, plotting requires lots of notebooks. I haven’t decided how the scene I’m working on right now will end, which is exciting and worrying all at once. I’ll have to leave it to the characters, really – sometimes they just don’t do things the way I planned them and suddenly everything changes. So I can’t wait to see how it plays out in the end 😉
NaNo is going well – I’ll have to fill the last 15K or so with short stories, which is going to be very interesting since I have no idea what I’m going to write about. But I’m looking forward to getting to know new characters and settings now, I really am.
Weekend
Thank God for weekends. Today, I came home just an hour earlier than usual but it made such a difference! I’ve written 3, 5K on my NaNo today (the novel has now reached over 70K and there aren’t that many scenes left, so it’s very exciting), which feels like a great daily word count considering I’ve been busy at work all day. It’s hard not to compare yourself to others and losing all hope when people have written 35K already… Today, I also happened to read about a girl who’s written 50K and won NaNo in just 24 HOURS. How is that even possible?! And she did this for several years, as well…
Tomorrow I will go visit a good friend and hopefully I’ll return on Sunday with a whole bunch of new writing ideas (because that’s what usually happens)! I need to do some short stories after I’m done with the novel, but I don’t know what they’ll be about yet. I’m also a bit nervous about the last part of the novel, an epilogue, because I don’t have a clue about how many pages it will be or what it will contain, I just know that there are a lot of things I need to tie together. Oh, well. Tomorrow it’s time for a scene that I’ve been longing for for months now, and it’s going to be so much fun to finally get to write it!
Elvira Bell 