1 Month, 50K Words, 0 Excuses

Soo... Once I included my post Nov 1 notes to the novel, I hit the 50K word mark.  I found that I was just adding more fluff for the sake of words to meet the deadline. I found that I was writing the same scenes twice and I'd skipped parts to move on with the story and have hit upon a really nice ending. I just couldn't bring myself to write 3000 words over the next two days that I fully intended to delete. It seemed like a deliberate waste of hours and effort.

Some of the stuff I was writing in a "telling" mode was the same quality/style as my notes, so I said, fuck it. I wrote those words in Nov for the novel, I'm including those words for validation purposes. I also discovered that their validation/ word count engine over-counts the words if it was a copy-paste from Word. Yay for me!

So now comes the easier part (harder for some) since there's no time-crunch. I'm going to go over the 160 pages to fill out some of the scenes that needs to be shown instead of told (if you need an explanation of Showing vs Telling, let me know and I'll explain). I need to clean up and tighten up the dialog and I need to add more interactions between some characters to not only develop the character, but their relationships with each other. I totally can see this blooming to be 300+ pages of quality fiction. Once I get the complete first (or second) draft done, I'll let people read/critique it. If you want to see it (and have not already mentioned it) let me know. I only plan on letting people who can give me detailed constructive criticism read it (the type of criticism that I'd expect to get in an advanced fiction writing workshop).

But that's for another day. Tonight, I sleep.