I finally did it! My official final word count is 50,931 words. I still have to clean it up a bit before I can pass it off to my editor friends, but it’s done. I’m a winner! Yay! It’s not even that crappy! I think the second plot line really improved the story, actually. I guess we’ll see what people think of it when they read it. Anyway, no more for me today. Bye!

Just for fun, I decided to try out the word count validator at the NaNoWriMo website. Lo and behold, it comes up with a different count than OpenOffice has been providing me. I was expecting a slight variance, but the official counter drops my count by over 700 words! This means I’m going to have to work a little harder to finish on time. Good thing I checked!

It seems I’m about as bad writing on this stupid blog as I am with my novel. I’m adding a second parallel plot line to try to keep my word count climbing. Going back and making the existing stuff longer requires a bunch of reading to make sure I’m adding things in the right place, and that just slows me down too much. It’s got a nice film noir feel to it, sort of a gangster detective type feel. We’ll see if I can milk it for another 6500 words or so. If I can, I’ll finish on time for sure. Unless I don’t.

Well, I managed to write enough words today to be considered “on schedule” to meet my goal of 50k words by the end of November. I’m really happy about that. I’ve got one week left and a nice long weekend at the end of it to get everything wrapped up. This all sounds good, but there’s a problem. You see, I just wrote the end of the story.

Yes, that’s right. I’m done. I’ve told the story.

So now what am I going to do with the remaining 13k words I still have to write? Well, I don’t really know. I had this problem before, the last time I wrote a novel during NaNoWriMo, and the only thing I can think to do is go back and add stuff to the story that’s not really there. I can’t do any editing, I can only add stuff, so doing that is going to be a challenge. Hopefully it’ll work out. I really thought I had enough plot to last the whole month, too. Next time around, I’m going to do two novel’s worth of plot so I won’t run out.

It’s almost depressing how far behind I am right now. I couldn’t bring myself to write for two full days, and I wasted most of today, too. I realized that I diverged pretty radically from my outline on a few points, so now I’m kind of making up the plot as I go. I have some vague idea where the ending is going to be and I’m writing towards it as I can, but writing a novel is sort of like swimming across a fast-moving river. At the end of the 50k words I’ll be on the far bank, but there’s no telling how far I’ll be swept down river from where I started, so I’m not exactly sure where I’ll end up. I guess that excitement is part of the point of all this. What am I, a philosopher? Meh, maybe. Maybe that’s why my story is so boring.