Another NaNoWriMo, another novel in the can…

Last night, while chatting with the fun people from my NaNoWriMo area in our chat room, I passed the 50k mark and also finished my novel. How is that possible, you may ask, when a novel is usually more than 50,000 words? Well, my friend, I am a filthy cheater. I actually wrote out a several big scenes as just narrative summary because I couldn’t deal with them at the moment and I wanted to get to the end of the book. Considering the epic number of massive plot holes and other issues with this draft, I’m not worried. I’m going to have to change those scenes anyway, at least this way I got them down in some form and got to the end, which was the most important thing in my mind.

If you go to my NaNoWriMo page, the description of my novel has read as follows since the month began:

Title: Untitled but there’s a big explosion in it 🙂
Description: Um… there’s this girl and…um… stuff…happens. Then something blows up.

Folks, let me introduce you to my newest work in progress which goes by the codename: Asplode! (Which is especially funny since I may be cutting out the explosion entirely.) I decided it was getting weird to keep giving my WIPs codenames related to their romantic relationship to me and, also, I have so many WIPs now, it was getting confusing. So, from now on, all future WIPs get better codenames. (Except for Mistress Novels 2 and 3 because if I changed those at this point you’d be like… what?)

The whole reason I let Asplode cut ahead in the line and get written before many other projects is actually pretty simple and logical: Asplode is the same genre as Mistress Novel, though a completely different universe. Since everything else I have in progress is either nonfiction, adult, middle grade or a play, I thought it might be nice to, in the event than an agent or publisher I send Mistress Novel to likes my writing but not that book, have something else in the can that was the same genre they are interested in. So I wanted to bang out this whole draft and then I’m going to put Asplode away for a few months while I work on other more pressing stuff. My subconscious will, of course, figure out all of the issues with the book in that time (HA!) so when I’m ready to go back to it, huzzah! Also, the fact that I at least have a first draft done makes it that much more possible for this:

YA Agent: I like your writing but I don’t care for Mistress Novel. What else do you have?
Me: *Pitches Aslpode*
YA Agent: Oooo, that sounds good, can I see what you have so far?
Me: Uh… sure! *panics. quickly polishes up first draft of Asplode* Here you go!

So, Asplode is, for now, my super emergency back-up novel. 🙂

A little about Asplode: The first draft I wrote this month, and I don’t say this lightly, is the worst first draft I have ever written. But that still doesn’t worry me. Because while I’m pretty sure the plot makes no sense and I wrote a whodunit and COMPLETELY FORGOT TO MENTION WHODUNIT (I am such an epic idiot, it’s actually pretty funny), I know the core of this book is good and I am onto something. I love the cast of characters in this book and the complexities of their lives so much that, even if I scrap the entire plot, I know I still have a book around these people. I also think that parts of my terrible draft touch on some very, very good stuff and there were moments while writing this draft that I became pretty sure this could be my best book so far if I could just figure out what the heck I’m doing. It’s just that all the good stuff is buried under piles and piles of terribleness. But I can see the statue in the lump of stone, you guys, and that excites me.

This book needs more than editing right now. It needs a back to index cards total overhaul. I may use mere sentences from my first draft in the final product. But, again, this is not a bad thing. I needed to write out this whole draft to figure out what goes in this book and what doesn’t and I’m many miles ahead of the game on this story then I was at the start of November. Also, this was my first time completely making a book up from scratch with no prep work so it was an important experiment for me. More on that process later.

So, the end of this year’s NaNo leaves me with mixed feelings. The last two victories were a total high. I got books written I’d been meaning to write for ages and, though rough, I knew they were good and could only get better.

I got a whole book written this month and that is cool but more in a passing of a gallstone kind of way than in a Yay, let’s party way. It’s going to someday be a very good book. But, right now, it’s a huge mess and instead of looking at it with pride, I’m looking at it going “Ugh, that’s going to be an insane amount of work.” To some extent, I’m excited about that work because I love taking terrible writing and making it into something good, especially if it’s my own writing. But right now, my gut reaction is to just say, “Bleh.”

I like this winner’s badge best. I love the book on it.

I envy people who don’t work in retail at this time every year. Every year, I finish NaNoWriMo and instead of going, “Good, now I can rest,” I’m just trying to throw words on the page to finish so I can go deal with the 9 billion eBay items I have to list/pack/ship etc. I know, I know, I get lots of perks from running my own business that are worth the trade off, but I just feel like whining right now, damn it. 🙂

As for the yearly write goal, I am 10,000 ish words away from meeting that. I would love to do the last bit with editing but experience tells me Dec will be insanity like always so I’m thinking it will be whatever I can bang out. We’ll see. Maybe if I bribe myself with writing by the Christmas tree…

I want to show you guys my little graph of my NaNo progress but I’m going to try to write a smidgen more today (just mostly notes to myself and pieces of scenes I forgot to put in) so probably tomorrow. (Can you tell that this entire blog post is just me putting off the eBay work I have to do? ;-))

Anyway, this concludes yet another National Novel Writing Month and, as always, I really have to congratulate every who took on this challenge, whether you “won” or not. You’re a winner for even putting yourself out there and trying and I really believe that. You rock and it’s been a blast writing with you!

And if you aren’t at 50k yet, keep writing! You can do it! Goonies never say die!