Thirty Days and Nights of Literary Abandon

And I'm done. 

With NaNoWrimo, not my novel. My novel is coming along nicely, but is not yet finished. I think I'm a bit more than half-way. 

I'm going to admit right now; I cheated just a little bit.  During NaNoWriMo you're supposed to write 50,000 words of your novel. Most days, I was in the flow and the frustrating thing was that I couldn't find time to write. However, there were a few days (towards the end, or course) where I was hit with Writer's block. So, to get my word count for the day, I wrote character description. These really helped me to solidify a few plot points. it also really helped clarify things and bring more character to my characters. It was also a good cure for writers block so I could keep writing in my novel. However, on November 23, when my word count his 50,090, I took out those character descriptions and realized that I had just lost 8,000 words. 

But, it was only November 23. You can't officially win NaNoWrimo until Nov 25, so I thought I'd keep writing and replace the 8,000 words from my character descriptions with 8,000 words of my actual novel. 

Yeah, since then I've averaged 500 words a day. And now Thanksgiving is over and everything for Christmas needs done NOW, so I'm out of time. That's okay though. I did end up with a final word count of 50907, and if some of that is character descriptions, that's okay. I'll keep working on my novel, but right now I need to do the things I've been neglecting all November. Like: cleaning my house, eating vegetables, actually talking to my husband and yes, posting on my blog. 

I am going to give myself a new goal: I need to write 5,000 words a week until the first draft of my novel is completed. That's not a lot compared to what I've been doing (my goal was 2,273 words a day) but it's still enough to make me sit down and write during my toddler's naptime.