Melonade

Last night at approximately 11:30 p.m., I was given one of these:


I passed the 50,000-word mark and the good robots at NaNoWriMo officially declared me a winner.

Whew.


That's pretty much how I felt about it. I was thrilled to have made it a day early and to have a draft with a beginning, middle, and (most challenging of all) an end. But after 30 days of madness, I'm really just glad the pressure's finally gone. The story's good (I think) but the current state of the manuscript is definitely not.

Well, after the holidays are over, it will be back to editing my other novel. In a few months, I'll dust off Novel #2 for editing.

I have a feeling there won't be any more writing today. Yesterday was rough, as I have surmised all Sunday writing will be. My brain just doesn't work as well on Sundays. At least we had gorgeous weather and I could sit outside Panera after they closed. Everything was going well until the elastic band on my Moleskine notebook caught the N key on my laptop and popped it off! For a few seconds, I just stared at the overturned key on the concrete and wondered if I would have to bow out of writing my story. C'mon, my main characters are Jane and Andrew. Definitely need the N if I'm going to stay in nanowrimo.

Luckily, the key wasn't broken and I snapped it back into place. Whew. Everything was great until this pregnant lady started smoking. That's right. Pregnant. Smoking. Uncool. That's when I retreated to Starbucks and got next to nothing accomplished.

Since my story deals with time travel both forward and backward, I've been thinking a lot about the Back to the Future movies lately. It didn't help that two of them were on TV the other day, or that the box set is sitting mere inches away from me and can be viewed at my leisure. But I've decided that rather than fight it, I'm just going to embrace the fact that there may be similarities. Not intentional, mind you, but similarities nonetheless. And that's true of just about everything I've ever written; halfway through I will inevitably think of some book I've read that shares elements with what I'm working on. That frustrates me, because I don't ever want to think that I'm a copycat writer.

Good things about today:
1. Met my word count plus a little extra.
2. Figured out my main character's last name.
3. Wrote a scene I was thinking about but couldn't write yesterday.
4. Managed to do this all before 11 p.m.

Bad things about today:
1. Beginnings of a sore throat. I always get some kind of throat/ear/sinus problem this time of year, so I'm just hoping this will be something mild that won't fight me while I'm writing.
2. Still struggling with the beginning of the story. I know there is a conflict between the main character and her best friend, but I have no idea what that is. Also, best friend's brother has the possibility to be an interesting character, and I didn't see this coming. Perhaps he is a catalyst in the confrontation? I can't tell yet.

It's almost midnight, so as I look out my the window of my apartment (and see a cat looking back at me!), I'll examine today's writing accomplishments.

At 9 a.m. I started writing. The sun was pouring in my open window, and the late night revelers were still quiet. I didn't mean to start so late, but it was past 3 a.m. when I finally got to sleep, so an adjustment was necessary. The novel started pretty much like I expected. Churned out about 1600-ish words in the first couple of hours, followed by several mini-sessions throughout the day. The last couple of hours has been spent helping my sister rearrange her furniture, 'cause I'm a sucker for that kind of stuff.

My other novel has several iTunes playlists. Each of the main characters has a personal playlist (save one) of songs that either have some connection to their part of the story or is music that they would actually listen to. These lists were honed over months after many more months of becoming acquainted with them. I've tried to replicate that for the new book, but it's impossible when I don't even know the main character well enough to know what music she'd listen to. So instead, I made a quick-n-dirty playlist of 52 songs that's been on repeat all day long. Not sure where I was going with that...I'm sure that sentence will make several appearances this month. Jane's voice is still foreign, so I guess until I grasp it I'll just have to write her words in mine.

As of now, I've got 2692 words under my belt. I could, and probably should, try to get in one more session before I call it a night. Or before all the neighbors start being noisy and I can't get to sleep.