Perfection

November 23, 2013

As I said yesterday, I was definitely going to finish my NaNo novel today. And finish it I did. (And while I’m speaking Yoda-ese… Weird this book is. Fun to write it was, but weird the end product is. Expect to read it anytime soon you shall not.)

I did something this NaNo that I have never done before. (And I’ve been doing this since 2004, so it’s been a while.) I wrote exactly 50,000 words. I got to the end of a sentence, looked at my word count, and it said “50,000”. Not “50,001”. No. I managed to hit the number exactly. Sure, I wasn’t done. I was in the middle of a paragraph. But it was a complete sentence. (Or as complete of a sentence as I write. I’m sure you’ve noticed that my style makes strong use of sentence fragments. As I always told my students: You can break all of the rules of writing once you learn them, but you have to be able to prove that you know the rules first. I happily break any number of rules of writing these days.)

I did finish that paragraph. And the next one. My final word count wound up being 50,174. But for a few minutes (when I opened my split of spumante to celebrate), I achieved a perfect 50,000 words this National Novel Writing Month. It’s a relief to be done. Working full time, blogging every day, and trying to write a minimum of 1667 words on a novel was a bit stressful. I’m glad to be back to blogging every day and only having to focus on other writing on the weekends. I can get back to my knitting now. Which is good. Christmas is coming up. (Anyone who thought they might be getting a Thanksgivukkah present is out of luck. There’s no way I’m getting anything finished by Thursday!)

So to repeat: No, you will not be getting a chance to read what I wrote this NaNo. I may take parts of it and turn them into an actual book, but most of it was just for fun.

But: I do have a book that I will be working on now that NaNo is finished. One that I do plan to publish for all of you to read. But please don’t start asking. I’m not sure exactly how long it’s going to take me. Especially since I’m still not sure where life is going to take me at this point in time. I’m still kind of hopeful that Sofia will have a brother or sister in the next year or so. And, of course, if she does, that will change everything.