NaNo winner!

I did, finally, finish NaNoWriMo today with 50,600 words. Now what?

Now comes time to edit. I plan on running this book through my best editing efforts, after which I will send it to a developmental editor to make it the best romance I can send out.

The name of it, if I haven’t mentioned, is Kringle in the Night, and it’s a sequel to The Kringle Conspiracy, which is out right now on Kindle.

Right now it’s really rough. It needs a little more Santa magic, and a little more of the noir feel I wanted it to have for the sake of the title. It needs some better word choices, and the little details need to be checked for consistency, and it needs to be checked for passive verbs and redundancies and overused words and maybe even words that are too big.

It needs a lot, but that’s okay. NaNoWriMo is not about writing a polished product, it’s about writing a first draft that will need more work to get to the final product. That’s what December and beyond is about, and I will live with this book daily during the Christmas season editing one chapter a day.

Deep breath. It’s done! For now.

Not doing that again.

I’m still done with NaNo. And my brain is fried.

Five hours a day editing seemed really rational while I was doing it, but I feel like half the month has passed without me really noticing. (It’s only one third of the month.) I’ve managed to get all my “work-work” done during that time period, strangely enough.

I’ve promised to continue doing NaNo, but only two hours a day. Maybe. If I can manage it.

Now back to final read of Gaia’s Hands, which has turned out to be far, far better than it was on first writing.

50K!

I just made my 50k words for NaNoWriMo (actually 50 hours, as I was rebelling this year by editing) in 10 days. That’s 5 hours a day, which means I wasn’t doing much of anything else but writing in my spare time.

It was insane. On the other hand, I think I have Gaia’s Hands to the point where, after a friend reads it, I could publish it. I think I learned a lot about editing. And focus. And feeling braindead at the end of a day.

I will finish a read-through on it, and then, I will probably start on Whose Hearts are Mountains. Only 2 hours a day, though. And it’s going to take a lot more work, because it has structural problems in the first third.

Time to pass out now.