What the Dickens? I’m a Novelist!

Ok, so I’m no Dickens, but I am officially, as of last night 28th November, a bona fide novelist! See the badge? See it?–>

I won! I wrote 50,000 words in less than one month for NaNoWriMo. See me jumping up and down with excitement? Go me!

I won’t say it wasn’t hard work… umm… well, actually, it wasn’t hard work to be perfectly truthful. It was an enormous amount of fun and I enjoyed every minute of my fantasy world playing out its story in my head. Now, my head is often usually a jumble of half-baked, incomplete, bizarre and random bits so you won’t be surprised that the novel is in much the same shape at the moment. There is still a long way to go before it’s likely to be even remotely worth reading, but riding the crest of this incredible wave of achievement and momentum, I have every intention of completing the 75,000 words needed to make it novel sized, (and fill in the huge gaps still in the story). I am hoping that my fellow winners, Ali and Sara, will also persevere with their own great works (I have read excepts, trust me on this one). It has been good for me to have that element of challenge and mutual support. Long may it continue!

Unless you are a bit geeky, you may not want to continue to read from this point on. I thought it would be fun, yeah geeky fun, to analyse my month’s writing. You may be aware that the NaNoWriMo site provides you with a graph to chart your progress, so from day to day you can see if you are on target. Of course you can identify from this graph when you have stalled or had bursts of creativity, but since the overall trend and focus is on the daily target line, it’s not always apparent how you have done from day to day.

Hence, sad person that I am, I whacked my daily word count totals into a spreadsheet and came up with this. It tells me that there was only one day this month that I didn’t write a single word and I had a good excuse for that one. I spent all day doing Tarot readings at Witchfest.  The interesting thing for me  is that I thought I had been fairly consistent from day to day, but the graph suggests that I seesawed around the daily target  from one day to the next, getting more extreme in the last week. I must admit that once the finish line was in sight, I was staying up until 2am some night if I was on a roll.

Well, that’s the boring stuff finished. If you want a taster of the novel (no plot spoilers or anything), I’ve posted a small excerpt to my NaNoWriMo Novel Info page, which you can get by clicking the winner badge on the sidebar. I think it will only work if you have a NaNoWriMo account yourself though, otherwise  you’ll just have to wait until it’s published 😀