Another Successful 30 Days

Do you hear the celebratory cheering? The hoorays? The clink of champagne glasses?

No? Then you must not be in tune with the results of this year’s NaNoWriMo, otherwise known as National Novel Writing Month.

See?

At about 10:30 a.m. Eastern, I decided to test my Word’s word count feature and try to validate my NaNo novel, the sequel to Virtually Yours – NaNo winner of 2009. (Also known as Virtually Yours, a Love Story in Thirty Days.) I call the new book VY2. (The new working title is Virtually Ours, a Wedding in Thirty Days, but I don’t know how that’s going to play out once I finish the book. Things can change.) As writers know, the word count feature can be flawed, so I wrote more than I thought was necessary. To my pleasant surprise, my official total was more than what was necessary: 50,149.

As I pointed out in the previous post, I’m most successful with NaNoWriMo when I have a plan, and this year I had a dilly of a plan. In fact, I began plotting this book back in the summer. I was also infused with a swell of ambition, not something this ordinarily lazy person has most of the time. I wrote nearly every day, and found myself feeling awful if I didn’t make time to write. I hope I can carry this work ethic beyond today.

While the book is far from finished, I’ve managed to formulate the story lines, strengthened the characters, and added the requisite twists and turns. There are several Big Reveals, none as big as the original, but I hope they’ll do. I tried something new this year; I wrote each POV separately and merged them all together this morning. I found that I could keep the separate stories more separate that way, and wasn’t as apt to repeat myself.

The next step is to print everything out, cut the scenes apart, and rearrange them in the order I want them to appear in the final book, fill in the color, correct my mistakes. And add the rest of the ending. 🙂

For a preview hint of what’s in this one, there’s the upcoming wedding of the decade between a NYC socialite and a romance novelist, their Internet friends (the Virtual Moms), an impossibly too small Vera Wang gown and an antique corset, reminiscing, a death, a runaway, a sex kitten next door who means to take one of the husbands, a sex-cort job offer, a hyper-self-conscious heavy woman who won’t say yes, a wildly popular talk show, the snowstorm of the century and displaced travelers, and the Little White Wedding Chapel in Las Vegas. Oh, and a mad blogger.

Whee! I’m so happy. You really can’t hear that celebration? or are you deaf? 😛