I won!

Another NaNo is ending, and yesterday I managed to cross the 50k line. I didn't get anywhere near the crazy 90k mark I really wanted, but that's okay. I'm happy with what I've got, and trying to do 90k in a month when I've got a job and a family and an all but useless limb is crazy.

The downside of that 50k is that not all of it is actual novel material. About 12k of those words aren't dialogue, description, and prose, but blow-by-blow accounts of how those scenes are going to play out. The reason for this basically came down to some maths.

I split the book into five chunks of story. Each chunk has a main idea to it, and it fits quite nicely. With nothing more than a general idea of one or two major events that would happen in each chunk, I started writing. I had every intention of writing the novel within 90,000 words.

Except I wrote a lot more than I expected to. By the end of part one, I was already sitting at over 30k. A lot of that was for scenes I wasn't expecting to write, which added significantly to the word count. I got worried, so I looked over my story and started to roughly plot out what each scene would be. Now I had all the scenes for my novel marked out with a sentence or two to say what would happen in them. Happy as a clam, I started writing again.

Very early into part two, I found myself sitting comfortably at the 38k mark. That worried me even further. If every chunk was the same length as the first, the novel would balloon to 150k. Unfortunately, part one is pretty much the shortest chunk of the five. I was looking at a novel that would be closer to 200k by the time I was done with it if I continued writing as I had, with only a rough idea of where it was going.

That scared me. I really, really wanted to reach the end of the novel by the end of the month. I didn't want to have yet another unfinished novel sitting in my dropbox. So I stopped writing blind. I put away the prose and started making plans. I started with the scene I was on, and starting writing out each and every thing that happens in every scene.

I still ended up with a lot of words. Each "scene" ended up between 200-400 words, and at the end of the final scene my total count was sitting comfortably above 51k. I feel a much bigger sense of accomplishment than if I'd simply continued writing until I hit 50k of prose, because I've completely mapped out the story and gotten to the end. Even though I know I still have a lot of work ahead of me before I finish it, I'm happy with what I have.

Now I just have to go back and turn each of those blow-by-blows into proper scenes...