Well, it wasn’t my best NaNo year, but it certainly wasn’t the worst! I got 38,749 as my total, but towards the end of the month I was brainstorming and outlining. I was counting these brainstorming hours at 1k each because I didn’t really have specific words to count, so the word count got a little screwy at that point.

All in all I’m pretty happy with this. Surgery and recovering from it has been a challenge, but I stuck with writing pretty well. My graph didn’t flatline as bad as I thought it would. (My husband just walked behind me and noticing it said “Did you really hit almost 40k words? I’m proud of you especially with everything going on” which totally made me feel good!) I haven’t done any real story writing in over a week, but that’s okay. My current focus is on the chapter-by-chapter outline for this book. I was getting stuck and struggling because I ended up not having it nearly as filled in as I thought I did, so once I was up to using my brain, this is where I’ve focused. I’m definitely a planner and if I don’t know where the story’s going, I start to panic.

So my goal for this week is to finish the outline. I have most of the story sorted out, I’m just a little iffy on the antagonists because they’re not as directly influencing the plot as they were in the previous book and will be in the third book. (There’s other antagonism at play in the story.) But I worked out better arcs for my MCs than I had before, so I’m happy about that!

My goal for the month is to get back into writing the book itself and also get back into Tumblr. I was already like two months behind with tag games, so I don’t even want to know how many I have to catch up on lol. I’ve been so sore that it’s been hard to sit at the computer and Tumblr mobile is terrible. I miss rambling about my writing and my dorks, so at some point soon I’ll get back into that, too.

Overall I’m happy with how NaNo went, considering, and I’m optimistic about how this draft of book 2 will turn out. :)

~Meri