Between 11:59 PM tonight and 12:00 AM tomorrow morning, I write 1,182 words, simply by switching from the NaNoWriMo word-count tool to the one built into my word processor.
I have 7 more scenes to write to complete From the Ashes of Courage, and most of those are epilogue. Today, I penned over 4,000 words, straight through the black moment, and now I’m perched on the other side. I decided to stop for the day after the following paragraph, which just about made me cry:
“George, it’s me, Gail. I’m sorry for waking you, but I just really needed to talk to someone who cares. And for all of our problems together, you still always cared, and I was hoping, maybe, you could talk to me for a while?â€
Little does Gail know… Might she actually find salvation from her perpetual emptiness?
I’m happy with the word count, even though I didn’t officially win NaNoWriMo, because I don’t expect this novel to reach 50,000 words. Right now, my latest estimate is about 48,000 words. And I don’t really want to push it to 50,000, not if that means I’ll be padding the story just to make it thicker. I knew that this might be the situation, and I knew that it was a valid situation, but I acutely felt the truth of it this month when I read Janet Evanovich’s Smitten, and estimated the word count at about 45,000 words.
You have to write to the story and not to the word count. And you have to avoid tricks that give you an inflated word count at the expense of the story. And as I discovered this month, if the story balls up inside of you, and you need to take a break, then you end up with fewer words, but do they count! See, there’s word-count, but then there’s words that count.
I’m not saying I couldn’t have written more, because there were days that I clearly could have. And I’m not saying that I couldn’t add more scenes, because I ended up with a long list of editing notes, which include suggestions for additional scenes that might add to the story. But I am happy to say that I’ve just about finished this entire novel—it will surely be first-draft done by end of day tomorrow—and I’m thinking it’s a doozy.
With more later…
-TimK
P.S. Who wants to be a beta reader? It might still be another month or so before I have a version ready for beta-readers. But if you want to beta-read it as an e-book, let me know, and I’ll email you a free pre-pub copy.