Happy holidays!

All I want for Christmas is...  a jump start on writing!  I haven't gotten anything further done since my last post, despite my goal to finish the novel by New Year's.  I'll be working on it this week, though, since I don't have to work my other job -- fingers crossed that the end will come quickly once I get back to work!  I'm sure I'm close.

I hope everyone's holiday is a happy one!

Progress post-NaNoWriMo

Progress has been on the slow side since NaNoWriMo ended, but I haven't stopped writing.  My goal on days that I write is a thousand words.  Over the weekend I got there.  Monday night I only got about halfway.

But I also am developing a better idea for where the novel is going.  Some things that I planned in my outline are going to work, and other things are being changed.  I've changed the order of events in this end section several times, trying to find something that feels right and maintains the pacing I want.

I've updated the meter in the sidebar to reflect the current word count: 81,297.  That's up 2k from the end of NaNoWriMo, at which point I had 79,293 words.  Not spectacular, by any means, but none too shabby, either.

I'd like to finish the novel by the end of 2012.  I doubt there is more than 15k left, so if I write a thousand words every day, I ought to get there -- and then I can focus on rewriting and revising (starting with finishing the job on the first novel) in early 2013!

Where NaNoWriMo got me

NaNoWriMo is over, and I failed to post to my blog even once during the entire month.  I wish I could say that it was because I was so busy writing my novel that I didn't have time to write anything else... but that wouldn't be true.  I was busy, and I was writing my novel, but the two were unrelated.  As a result, I only got about halfway through my target word count for the month (25k instead of 50k).

I don't consider it a total failure, though.  I may not have a winner's certificate, and I didn't finish the novel yet (this being the novel of which I wrote the first half in August, during Camp NaNoWriMo), but I'm 25k closer.  I think I'll actually have an ending in another 10 or 15k.

But more importantly, I filled in some huge plot holes that were nagging at me, and completed some important research.  I also realized several things about the series, and that is that this book is not really Prometheus's Flame.  That is the second book, or rather a novella occurring after Pandora's Box and before this book.  I have an idea for a title for this one, but haven't finalized it yet, so for now it will have to remain a mystery.

My goal for December is to finish the current book (now Book 3, as I'm going to count the novella as its own book).  Once that's done, I'll let it sit and germinate while I perform the rewrites and the new-writes (scenes I need to add that got overlooked the first time around) on the first book.  As you may remember, I had done a round of simple revisions over the summer, but I'd left the hard stuff -- the scenes that needed to be totally rewritten, and the things I realized I'd completely left out -- for later.

Hopefully I will be able to maintain a steady enough pace without NaNoWriMo to keep me motivated (not that it succeeded so well at that this past session).  I have some writing friends I meet with regularly, including a few new ones that I made during NaNoWriMo this year, so hopefully I'll be able to maintain enough of a writing atmosphere to help with the motivation!