NaNoWriMo Defeated! 105K Word Novel Written in 20 Days!
Posted on November 22, 2009
Filed Under Writing Process |
After an active 20 days, I made it to the end of my NaNoWriMo. When I first heard of National Novel Writing 
Month back in the spring, I didn’t think anybody would write anything worthwhile in thirty days. I knew I could write the 50K words for NaNo. I wasn’t going to participate, but decided that I had to do it once. So in order to make it more of a challenge for my nimble fingers, I decided to write my whole Bellian novel in the month of November. I did it. Since the NaNo site has a spot for a book cover, I created the one shown on this post. It was done in Adobe Illustrator. I took a photo of a temple folly in the UK and photoshopped it to add in all of the jungle and vines, added more building and put in the Reberrant in the foreground with his bone claw weapon.
Bellian’s Journey is complete as a first draft at 105,000 words. Now that’s the first draft that’s complete. I have to edit the basic words (just about done) and then I need to let is sit. I’ve been thinking about some things for the rewrite and there are two characters that the readers are going to want to know more about, so I’ll have to give them a bit more playing time.
I wrote this from a treatment I wrote at the beginning of the Liberty Hall Writers’ Bloody August worldbuilding exercise. The world came from the exercise. When that was over I took both of those and created about 75 scenes to use as a wireframe to write the first draft. The preparation worked out really well, I thought. Where the outline constrained me a bit too much for the Panix novel, this method allowed more freedom to write the story.
I don’t think I’ll participate in NaNo again. Writing fast is not a challenge for me. I’ve found I write about 1,250 an hour in draft mode. That works out to 80 hours for a 100K word novel. I put about 40+ hours or so into the initial worldbuilding and another couple of hours putting the treatment together.
NaNo was fun and it was fun doing it with a lot of the Liberty Hall and Hatrack Writers Group folks.
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