Monday 28 November 2016

NaNo Update: I won!



I did it!

I finished up yesterday evening with 50,243 words and the story is done. I was hoping that it would be a little longer but I let my good start lull me into a false sense of security and took rather too many days off from writing. Part of that was to work on my competition entry, but not always, sometimes I just couldn't really be bothered to write.

Next time I need to work on that.

Also things took a turn from what I'd originally intended. I'd planned for my two main characters Selah and John Mitchell to develop a strange sort of friendship but after meeting on the bus she just became obsessed with tracking him down. But they didn't actually meet again until near the end when she found his house, collapsed in his garden and then shortly afterwards expired.

They did have a good long talk prior to that but if I rewrite it, I'd kind of like to fix it so they at least hang out together a couple of times. It wasn't until after I'd written myself into a corner that I remembered that I'd wanted to do a bunch of stuff with Selah sneaking out of the house to visit him and learn about his past, convinced that somehow he would have some answer to her future.

There was also a whole subplot with John Mitchell raising Jennies (genetically modified) pigs, possibly descended from the one he was born from, which I never actually got in to. Mainly because I didn't plan this beyond a note in a margin which said 'maybe JM raises Jennies'. Also something to add into a rewrite.

I'm pretty pleased that I did actually finish it though. It's become a bit of a trend for me to write the beginning 50,000 (or 100,000) words of a story but not actually finish it during the month. I'm glad I reached the end of this one (even if it was getting down to the wire, I knew Selah was dying and I still had 2,500 words to write, so I got VERY descriptive all of a sudden which is highly illogical since she's going blind and isn't really aware of what's going on around her, but oh well).

I've had a couple of people ask to read this one... It might be a while, but maybe. I might share some snippets here once I've polished them up a little.

Maybe...

2 comments:

  1. Congrats on the win. Now, set it aside and come back to it with fresh eyes in January.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thank you. And that's pretty much what I plan to do. :-)

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Let me know what you think. :-)