Sharp Words

So, as previously mentioned, I made my 50,000 words. A day early, in fact, despite November having been my month of ‘Two Floods and a Funeral’ and many disruptions to all my plans, writing or otherwise.

I actually wrote some extra on the 30th, and finished with a grand total of 52,254, which I was pretty damn pleased with.

However, unlike previous years when I’ve usually just given up straight away (or last year, when I finished the actual story of the novel on November 30th), I need to keep writing. I’ve promised my husband that I’ll actually finish this novel, and get it ‘published’ using the CreateSpace offer that’s available to all NaNoWriMo winners – meaning that by next autumn, I will have an actual published book in my grabby little hands.

I’m near the end of the story, so finishing it off won’t be too much of a chore (and any words I write towards finishing it will get added to my year’s 50,000 word goal, up in the right-hand sidebar of this blog – 50,000 words which don’t include my NaNoWriMo ones). But I will need to do a fair bit of editing and a large number of general corrections; my timeline got completely muddled, for example, and I kept forgetting the name of various alien species or misspelling alien names. The plot could do with a bit of tidying-up and tightening too, so I’ll maybe sleep on that a couple more days (nights) until I figure out how to finish the story off neatly.

But this is my Pledge to (self-)Publish in 2010. I’ll get this novel finished off and in a form that my husband will be comfortable reading, and then I can be proud of myself.

And in the meantime, I’ll figure out what my proper goals for 2010 are: the ones that will actually help the progress of my writing ambitions. (Otherwise known as the ones that I never actually follow through on… oh well, if I don’t make plans, I wouldn’t even get started at all.)