Victory is mine

I didn’t intend to do NaNoWriMo this year until about October 28, when an idea suddenly popped into my head. This idea was an actual plot sketch for an idea that I’ve been kicking around for a couple of years, which never got much beyond the premise: “Beach Reading,” an absolutely insane hash of random bestseller trends with enough humor that you might be tempted to think it was a parody, except that it really isn’t.

So I thought that this book needed to be short and written quickly without a lot of backward glances and worrying about whether things made sense. And so, NaNoWriMo. I started writing with the first day of action firmly in mind, and a general idea of where I wanted to go with it, but I tried not to overplan. For example, we never got to the zombie apocalypse, and we never got to a fabulous location other than Las Vegas.

I started writing on November 2, and got so far ahead that I didn’t worry about making wordcount, except then I missed two days entirely and didn’t catch up until that weekend. I started to track my daily wordcount, and this made me a very strong believer in the wisdom of writing Every Single Day. It was amazing to me how quickly I would get behind if I spent even one day not writing, and amazing how quickly I could catch up if I hit it more than once every single day — an hour in the morning and then at least an hour at night typically yielded more than 2,000 words.

The combo of Orycon, Thanksgiving, and two days groaning on the couch mean that I was about 9,000 words behind when I woke up this morning. I estimated my wph (words per hour) at 1,000 and figured it meant I could finish if I spent all day at it. I ended up writing something like 11,000 words today, because it was important to me to finish the story and not just make wordcount. And my back is tired. My fingers are tired. My wrists are tired.

Why the heck am I typing this right now?

I’m going to go demand a massage from paulcarp.