NaNoWriMo is officially over! I am pleased to say I wrote my 50,000 words by Monday, one full day before the due date. My winner badge is now my profile picture on Facebook. I wish I could say the book is actually finished but sadly it’s not. It needs at least another 40,000 words to be a complete book. My friend Dale Mayer, on the other hand, completed her book for NaNo. She did the same thing last year. She is my inspiration for next year. I want to complete a full 90,000 word manuscript for NaNo next year.
I had a few tough days where I got stuck so I went back to scenes I’d already written to add to them. Tweak them a bit just to get words on the page. Then some scenes just wrote themselves. The opening of the book is pretty good if I do say so myself. 
I had my writing group critique the first five pages and they say those pages are grabbers. They were interested and wanted to read more.
I never wanted anyone else to learn my main character’s secret. I wanted to keep it with her best friend and her boss knowing. But last night, even though I had won NaNo, I kept writing and discovered her partner will find out. Maybe not in this book, maybe in book two. But he will find out. He’s curious by nature, that’s why he became a police officer and then a detective. He’s suspicious too because she’s hardly ever at the station yet knows things about the case and the victims he hasn’t told her.
I learned lots about my story. Some of it I’ll keep, some of it will probably change. Of those 50,555 words I have no idea how many I’ll actually be keeping once I go back to revise. But I am happy I got it all down. Sure I need more scenes here and there to fill it out. Add to the character growth. I’ve already got clues in there for book two. I can add more of those. I wrote the ending but I need more for the middle. I also need to put everything in order. After about chapter three I just started writing random scenes out of order.
I learned about my process and what works for me. Took me long enough. I’ve been writing for a long time and never knew quite what worked for me. Now I know I need a vague idea of the outline. I need one to three sentence descriptions of the scenes that I need. Then I can write like mad.
Now that it’s December I will start to catch up on the things that got put on hold for November. And I will continue to write my book.
Right now, I’m off to work.
Until next time…
Cindy
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