The month of November has come and gone with my NaNoWriMo activities. The excitement is over, and now for the glory: I did make my 50,000 words! #NaNoWinner2015

Although Book 2 is still not finished, I’ve made a lot of progress. I uncovered the subplots needed to carry the book through, I met my word count by turning off my internal editor, and I know that I can write every day if I commit to it.

Expect some exciting Saturday Snippets of the new bits I’ve added, as well as some other things I learned or discovered during my NaNo journey.

Next Steps

For the novel:

Updating my electronic files to bring all the disparate pieces together, from all the different places I’ve stored it: Google Docs, Dropbox, scrap paper, and my ultimate Scrivener file. Once it’s all in one place, I’ll need to reorder it and add in the new scenes I’ve plotted. There’s some rearranging of the story line that needs to happen so that I can continue forward with minimal rewriting. Then I’ll update all my scene targets and keep at it. I also left out all the research elements I discovered I needed: some basic botany, a better look at where scenes were occurring within the universe of Andoth, and why I might pick certain characters to do a particular task.

For the blog:

Schedule some posts I prepared on days that I was having trouble moving forward on the novel. As many people have pointed out, it’s MUCH easier to write informally than formally, and on the days I needed some extra padding, throwing together a quick blog post was the easiest way to do it. What that really taught me was that I can blog more than I currently do without slowing my progress on my novel-writing. Several of the posts I prepared are really long, so it looks like we’ll have a few series coming up in 2016.

For myself:

Even though I hit my word count early yesterday, my husband and I still didn’t go to bed early since we hadn’t spent a lot of time getting to talk without the interruption of two very precious but attention-needing munchkins. So we spent the evening catching up. Now I need to focus a little more on getting back into an exercise routine and find a better balance of writing within the confines of healthier choices.