Finished!

About 15 minutes before Veronica Mars, I finished a scene and checked my word count. It was 50,145. A few days ago, when I checked the offset between OpenOffice’s word counter and NaNoWriMo’s word counter, I calculated that it would be about 144 words off at 50K. I figured, what the heck. I saved it to a text file, scrambled the letters as directed, and uploaded it.

50,000 exactly. I have officially completed National Novel Writing Month.

I have no illusions as to the quality of those 50,000 words. But it’s only a first draft. I’ve never written a first draft of a novel before, so that’s pretty cool!

The main things I’ve learned are:

1. I actually can sit down with no idea of what I’m going to write and come up with characters and a story.
2. Discussing writing issues with another writer (i.e. alenxa), even in vague terms, can help solve problems and crystallize ideas.
3. When I really get going, I can write about 800 words an hour (at least on the computer)
4. I can actually sustain a story over ~110 pages.
5. I need to do a lot more research on medieval Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, and snow.
6. Writing follows a bell curve: it’s hard to come up with ideas when you’re starting out, gets easier in the middle as you start running with things, and when you get near the end, it’s hard to pull everything together and wrap it up. (added)

Next step: sleep. After that, start revising, and figure out how soon I’m willing to let beta readers see it.