Tuesday

30 November 2010

At 11 o'clock last night, my eyes were blurry.
My head hurt.
My asterisk...it was a weird combination of numb and sore.
I'm not sure I was even speaking coherently.

That's what happens when your head has exploded and your brains are all over the room. Things hurt. Speech is difficult. Vision, not so wonderful.

All of that is the effect of NaNoExploMo* and 3 days of being planted in one position, trying to crunch the 13,000 words you're short in your NaNoWriMo effort. And really? You're doing it all so that you'll be a WINNER and get the spiffy PDF winner's certificate that you an print out and display for the whole world (or the people who wander into your house) can see.

Now, there is a t-shirt you can buy so that you can share it with the whole freaking world, but the goal is that PDF.

Seriously.

Yesterday morning, I still needed 5,000 words and was fairly sure I was not going to get it until the last minute--and the last minute would be fine, because at least I was going to make it this year.

But at 11 last night, or thereabouts... 50,054 words.

OK, my count was 50,215, but the NaNoBots counted it low. But it was still over 50K, so I got my certificate and a spiffy graphic to display on my blog.

 Word, doods.

Now, what I have is 50,000 + words of total crap. 75% of what I've written will never make it into the final manuscript, but I have the bones of the story, and I know in which direction it will go. I also discovered a few things about characters I've been honing since I was 15 years old, some that made me a bit sad, some that made me laugh.

I hadn't intended to do a 5th Charybdis book so soon--I have 3 or 4 others in the hmmm this would be decent stage, but there was some actual campaigning from a few different corners of the Internet. More than one person wanted another book in teh series, and NaNo was a good time to see if there was another story there, one that would be worthy of fleshing out from concept to completion.

This story got its start while I was training for the SGK 3 Day; as I walked along, early on in the training, the first pages came to me; I knew it was going to be a different bent, written in a tone the other books don't have, but it strongly appealed to me, so I took notes, thinking that someday I'd get to it.

And here we are. I finished the NaNoEffort this year, got my PDF, got my blog graphic, and have what I hope will be a fairly decent start on a fairly decent book.

No, don't ask me what it's about. I can never answer that clearly.

But I will tell you this:

The working title is Flipside, and we're going to heaven, people...

*Thanks to Char for that lovely expression

5 comments:

april said...

congratulations! I thought about it, but only for a nanosecond (HA!) but I'm glad you powered through! Now can you come to Florida and help me train to not die during a 5k?

Angel, Kirby and Max said...

Congratulations. Even if you cut most of it, you did more that a bunch of other people!

Geekwif said...

Awesome!!

Andrea Fuentes said...

Awesome!! I figured your fingers would be sore but sounds like they are OK.

Tiki, Kirby, and StanLee said...

Congratulations! Daddy is glad he is finished too. So are we. More snuggles!