As excited as I am about hitting this mark and having less than 10,000 words left to write to meet my NaNo goal, it’s become abundantly clear to me that this book will be well over 50k words. That’s pretty typical for fantasy quests, and I’m not surprised (in fact, I’m excited about just continuing on and churning out words) it just makes the potential of hitting 50k a little less of an achievement and more of a marker along the way.
REGARDLESS, we are so damn close!
Even with me missing a few days while we had visitors (writing is a very solitary task and as hard as I’m working to turn writing into a skill it’s still emotionally draining), I sailed through 40k like it was nothing. Sprints are a godsend and treating writing like it’s a job is the way to go. Don’t wait for inspiration, wrap your hands around your muses’s neck and choke out the damn motivation!
I’m still not sure I’m getting particularly good prose, but I do know there are some gems on those 80 odd pages and the foundation for something pretty great. This isn’t to say I know this whole thing will be gold in the end, I just have quite a good feeling about it all. I’m not second guessing the plot or even getting bored of it, but discovering more about my characters and loving their journey.
Here’s what the last few days looked like:
My sprints kind of fell apart today (also note I didn’t adjust for military time there at the end, oops!), but that’s because I kept having ideas that made me jump around the story. I’m not in favor of that in general (going back and adding feels too much like editing), but I’m at a place in the story where certain occurrences need to call back to other things, and I pop back to enter those details, even if only in a note.
For instance, in a very early chapter, my main character, Ellyson, looks out on a patch of trees and reminisces very briefly on her childhood. Later, in chapter 16ish, she tells a story about a specific tree, so I made sure to pop back up to that initial reminiscence and reference the specific tree so the call back is more meaningful. I don’t want the reader to hear about this very significant-to-Elly tree for the first time in chapter 16 because if there’s no basis to the tree existing for the reader, then it’s just a damn tree (and the emotions she attaches to her story feel fake). But if they saw her look at it longingly early on, even if they don’t know why she gave a shit about it then, the seed of significance was planted, so later it means more. Look at the fucking tree, Dear Reader. You can forget about it immediately, if you want, but you’ll fucking remember it when Elly tells you about climbing it.
First 10K – 426 minutes or 7 hours and 6 minutes.
Second 10k – 352 minutes or 5 hours and 52 minutes
Third 10k – 287 minutes or 4 hours and 47 minutes
Fourth 10k – 295 minutes or 4 hours and 55 minutes
So have I hit my stride? There is a part of me that likes to see some consistency, but of course I want progress. It should be noted that the further I go into the story the less specifics I know ahead of time. I know, for example, my heroes are about the head off to a bay city to look for some pirates, but I don’t know anything about the city except that it’s in a basin, and I don’t know anything about the pirates except that they’re not going to be exactly all they were cracked up to be (whatever the hell that is). This is hugely different to when I started out in chapter one when I knew right down to some of the dialogue how those scenes would pan out. I imagine if my plot were even tighter and better thought out this thing would be going by much more quickly. Plans for the future, my friends.
The next time I drop a camp update it should be about winning NaNo for the first time in my entire, ridiculous life, and I can hardly believe it. July’s been pretty good to me, so thanks, birthday month, you always bring surprises.
A.K. Caggiano 
Excellent job! The power was within you all along! /cliche
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