My NaNoWriMO Experience

Hello, all!!

I believe in this post I promised to tell you all more how NaNo went for me.

First of all it went. (Like literally, November is over, guys).

Second of all I, uh, won. I guess that's what they call it when you complete NaNo, though I don't understand why. What did I win? Lol... the feeling of accomplishment??? 

I don't really call completing a challenge winning. Contests are for (one) winners and (lots of) losers. Challenges are for the many who achieve to do the impossible: stretch their mind for the mere sake of stretching.

It's the time to hold yourself accountable to yourself. The thing about challenges is when you fail there are no real consequences, but when you succeed the victory is sweeter than any reward!

Rant finished: I am a NaNo completer!!!!!

Now for my story of how it actually went.

The last couple weeks of October I spent doing a lot of thinking... "talking" to my characters, fleshing out stories, and doing brief chapter outlines.

I did one page for every chapter, and did 22 chapters, as that would divide up to 2,273 words each from the whole 50k.

(I did end up adding another chapter, so there were 23 :b)

I also made myself a schedule to keep everything prioritized

And then I made myself a graph to keep my word count straight.

On, top of that I did three pages of descriptions of all my characters and wrote out a brief summary of the mystery that is woven through the book.

These were all the preparations I did.

And then came November. This story has been on my mind and heart so long that I had little trouble getting involved with the writing.

The week before I "practiced" my schedule by doing it, just working on another piece of fiction I had to write.

So getting up that early wasn't so hard.

And for the most part everything went REALLY good. It was an awesome experience.

There was one time when my screen froze - went black. And I was sooo scared I had lost my novel! This was around day 20, so it would have been horrid to have lost so many words... and having done that much work and not be able to finish!

Thankfully, my laptop started working.

But I got smart and emailed my story to myself after that ;b

The last 3-5 days were hard, too.

I was really tired from other things. And my book was just going so slow, it felt. And I was just ready for NaNo to be over.

But I trudged through those last couple days and completed both NaNo, and my novel with 51,026 words :)

As to my novel itself?

IT IS AWESOME!!!!!! 

(besides the ending)

I love it so much! It is a retelling of the original Egyptian Cinderella story/ Biblical Esther story mixed with tons of my imagination. I set it between Abraham's and Joseph's time (Early Bible days). It has a mystery surrounding the fur slipper. And it totally bashes all the ideas in modern Cinderella stories such as love at first sight and the meaning of true love. 

And I love all my characters.

And I even wrote my Biblical namesake in there!!!

So, yeah, it is really neat.

But it needs a lot of rewriting. And I'm giving the book a two month break or so till February. So, it probably won't be ready for all you beta readers till mid-late spring. :)

So, did you do NaNo? Have you done it before or want to do it in the future? And who wants to be put on my list for future beta readers of The Fur Slipper!?