50,000 words later

One of Girlfriend's friends and coworkers dubbed the period after November "NaNoNoMo," and although I immediately asked Girlfriend never to say that again, the term keeps coming up in my head. NaNoWriMo is done, after all, emphatically. Everyone I know who started, finished, including myself. My Arthurian saga has grown by another 50,000 words. While this installment is unusually talky and will probably shrink, rather than grow, in the revision, I'm glad I forced the ideas through the pressure-fired chaos engine of an arbitrary and unreasonable deadline. Even though I thought I had a plot in my mind, more or less, I surprised myself three times (by my quick count) with spontaneous decisions, made either at the keyboard or in the bathroom, that turned out to be my story.

I had intended, setting out, to make this installment about the reign and death of Uther Pendragon. When I finally got the crown on Uther's head around the 40k mark, I realized that he wasn't going to die this month. I had written a book in between the beginning of my story and the beginning of my plot.

So that was fun. A weekend later, I've got work to do (which is a nice change from the week before) and a lot of freedom (which is unnerving after a tight-packed month). I can get back to my 12 Dancing Princesses retelling, which I should have finished in October, or really in July. I can relax.

Oh, right. Christmas.