Last day Party!

[CQuinlan]

Okay people! It's finished!

So tell me of your best day, your worst day, your highs and lows. Share how you got through your own personal 'dark night of the soul', make a practice pitch for your story, post an extract, post how you are celebrating/mourning. Share what you will, my fellow Nano survivors!

[Wilde_at_heart]

I was on a roll as I wrote the climax of my story, and had hit well over 45K. Kept writing, boom I was finished and WTF? I was only at 48K!

Gah!

So I took a day or two off, then went back to the beginning to fill it out more.

That's my drama. I finished several days 'early' so now it's...

...now what?

[CQuinlan]

I'm exactly the same. I got to 47k and got stuck. I managed to finish but I am not a happy puppy. No idea what to do with myself now.

[amschilling]

I find myself in the same place I was last year. I made the 50k, but I have a lot more writing to do to finish up the first draft. And a TON of editing ahead of me. Same ups and downs as last year, too--I started slow, getting nowhere for the first week, and then panicked and wrote like crazy to get to the end goal.

Last year's book cleaned up nicely, and got into the finals of a spec. fiction contest. And it's getting some nibbles from agents on query. Only took about a year of blood and sweat. So I know I can finish this one and bring it up to snuff, too. I just have to motivate myself to keep going. That part's always the challenge with the holidays so close.

I think I'm going to take a week off to rest my wrists, and then jump back into it. And try like heck to resist editing until I've got the last 30k of the story written down.

[Sage]

I got to 50K on the 17th, and there were two great write-ins that weekend, so I knocked stuff out there. And then I had that Monday off before Thanksgiving and I had an awesome day writing a scene that was both intense and touching. And then I didn't write for a week. My novel was stuck at 57K, nowhere near the end for ages.

I always finish the novel during NaNo, except for one year when I missed it by an hour (but only because I tried to write an epilogue I ended up scratching anyway). Last year when I lost, I still finished 2 books (I was writing chapter books). Of course, usually I'm looking at 50-65K at the end and this went to almost 75K, but I stress that last week about getting to "The End" as much as anyone would stress about getting to 50K.

On Wednesday, I was worried because I hadn't even gotten to the climax yet. I got there during Thursday's write-in, and finished up yesterday. I tend to know how my climaxes will go, and then suddenly in one scene there was an unexpected death (sort of. I mean the character was already a ghost), and it had me crying in the middle of the cafe. The rest I wrote yesterday is ho-hum writing, maybe because I knew more or less how it would go down, but I am obsessed with that one scene, so I'm glad I struggled to get it all done, because the best surprises sometimes come when you're racing towards a finish line

[folkchick]

I had trouble at the end. Things were wrapping up early and it just seemed like those last 2K were going to be impossible to get down, but somehow I did it. Then, when I copy and pasted in the validation box, it said I still needed about 150 words. Geez!! So, I found a section I was going to work on later and, viola! Done.

This experience taught me that I can still write without laboring over every single word. When I look back, it's amazing to think of the journey, both for me as a writer, and for my characters in the book. And it was nice working with my fellow writers here at AW.