Last night, while it was still November 22 in my time zone, I hit my 50K words, thereby crossing the finish line of my fourth NaNoWriMo. (pause for cheers)
This year I'd interrupted an active WIP to do NaNo. Okay, maybe "interrupted" isn't fair. Work on Under the Bus had stalled. Partly because the fiction-writing section of my brain was struggling to let go of The Upsilon Knot sufficiently to focus on a less colorful contemporary story. Enter good old NaNo! Nothing like a deadline to force concentration. That was the good news. Bad news was the project I'd decided to work on. I have a self-sabotaging habit of playing by the rules, and NaNo rules say to start a brand new project. I certainly couldn't dare work on another Upsilon project (last year's solution), not while I was having such a time separating from that world. The most likely candidate waiting in the wings had its own world and a handful of characters whose stories I wanted to tell. Problem was, it had no plot; without a sense of direction, it's hard to write at this pace. Even worse, the project I call PDQ is set in a thoroughly depressing dystopic future. Enough said.
Somehow, astonishingly, I kept on and even found my way to a...well, more a framework than a plot. Last night I made my 50K. And NaNo continues 'til the end of the month; I could keep writing until the bitter end, as I have every other year.
I've always been proud of breaking 60 K. However, NaNo did the trick; I can't wait to leave the world of PDQ and leap back into Under the Bus. As they don't even start to verify wins until the 25th, I've made the following decision -- which I'm posting here to make sure that I stick to it. I'll keep working on PDQ 'til the 25th; I still have some left from the list of scenes I'd identified. Then one more day, to jot down all my mental notes regarding the order of scenes; should I return to this project some day, I'll want to have all of this on hand. The day after Thanksgiving, I'm back, 100% fiction-writing energies, on Under the Bus.
(pause to let out giant sigh of relief!)
