NaNoWriMo
I won! On November 29th, I cleared the 50,000 word finish line. For now, the novel is about half done. Out of the two main characters, only one has a complete story arc, which needs work. Overall, I’m happy with that performance. I learned a lot about my personal writing habits and pushed myself outside my comfort zone. The novel, tentatively titled The Depths of Faith, needs a lot of work. Revising it will be my 2021 task, and it will also likely be next year’s NaNoWriMo goal.
I took this past week off to both decompress and to investigate my performance. Prior to NaNo this year, I decided that sleep was more important than meeting my daily word count goal. Of all my preparation work, that was the most significant. November had a lot of work meetings outside of normal working hours, and this meant I was writing later at night than I cared to. I could have kept going, but with my anxiety issues, lack of sleep would increase the likelihood of panic attacks. Writing is not possible during a panic attack. The main lesson to takeaway is that self-care allowed me to persevere to the end. This is a hard lesson that I have to learn over and over again. I’d prefer to work and work and work until the problem is solved. But that isn’t healthy, as I’m learning. So, in 2021, self-care will be the name of the game for me.
The second biggest lesson is a complete shocker for me. My writing style isn’t what I thought it was. I didn’t like to plan. When writing, I wanted to discover the story in the same way a reader would. Before hand, I did minimal prep work. Thinking up names and five things they carried in their pockets was about it. Often, I’d be able to see a beginning and an ending as well. So, I’d start writing at the beginning and explore until I got to the ending. While this was fun, it often slowed me down. Because I’d have to sit and think about plot points. How do my characters get from start to finish? I did this thinking while typing on the page. My word counts during this ranged from 200 to 500 per day. This pace is nowhere near enough words to meet the goal of 50,000 words in a month. This time, I went against every fiber of my writerly being and did some exercises. I used Dan Well’s plotting device; I created character sketches; I did some world building; I wrote out of order; I skipped part of scenes. Funny enough, all these things other writers do worked for me as well. In the future, I will have to set aside my ego to try new things. To be clear, not everything I tried worked for me, and that’s okay. The real fun was exploring what did and didn’t work.
Reviews
2020 is coming to a close, and I don’t think we’ll be sad to see it go. I’ll be posting two reviews this month, and I can’t think of two better books with which to end the review year. I have a few more books to review from NetGalley and Edelweiss, but I haven’t planned them yet. So, I won’t be sharing them here. Check back later.
Just Finished
I just finished Dan Koboldt’s Domesticating Dragons, and I loved it. You can find my review here.
Currently Reading
I’m currently reading Stina Leicht’s Persephone Station, and it’s wonderful. I like the world building here, and I know I’ve missed some stuff. Plus, look at that cover. It’s beautiful. It reminds me of Aeon Flux and Reign: The Conqueror. I’m about halfway through, and I don’t know if there will be more books set in this universe. But I sure hope there are.