This was the year that I didn’t think I would get those 50,000 words on (virtual) paper, for National Novel Writing Month. There was too much else that had to be done. One of my avocations is being a marriage celebrant (I love romance). Here on the Gold Coast of Australia, November is wedding season.  It’s the month where we’ve well and truly seen the back of winter but it hasn’t started to get too hot. Perfect for beach weddings. So there have been brides and ceremonies and planning and writing all month. Wonderful fun but none of it progressing my novel.

I made early mornings and evenings after dinner my NaNo time and the novel moved along. One word after another. A sprint here and there. And many cups of tea.

The story needs at least another  twenty thousand words to finish but it’s a start.

Terry Pratchett is reputed to have said, “The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.” This is the mantra I took in writing this month. The story is rough, rough, ROUGH. It lacks tension between the main characters, there’s a lack of depth in many of the scenes. Some of it doesn’t even make sense.

It’s a draft.

I locked my inner critic in the next room for the month, but I can hear the scratching at the door. Things will soon be back to normal.

I can’t say it’s been a great month for writing, but it has been productive. It’s a start my novel may not have had without the 50K goal. Now it’s on to finish, edit, redraft and re-edit. And maybe, at the end of all of that, there’ll be a publishable work in there somewhere.