And just like that, NaNoWriMo was over. November was grueling. There were days when I didn’t meet my goals, but I made up the word count each time. Toward the end, I lost all motivation, felt no inspiration, and was sure the quality of my writing was abomination. The deadline looming at the end of the month was the one thing that kept me going. Somehow I pushed through, and I’m happy to say that I finished the first draft of my sequel today with a whole day to spare! Now that I know it can be done, the pressure is on to write book three in one month as well… Ugh.

After kicking NaNoWriMo’s butt, I’m taking a couple weeks to rest and edit some other projects before I start revising this novel. Let me tell you, it is going to need EXTENSIVE editing. 

*The above photo is from The Return of the King, produced by New Line Cinema.

November is National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo for short. The goal is to write an entire novel in one month. I’ve never done it before, but this year I decided to take the challenge. I’ve been working on my sequel to Falling for the Villain since November 1st, writing a 4,000 word chapter each weekday. The book will be about 20 chapters long.

It has been exhausting to say the least! As of today (Friday, November 19), I have 58,000 words. It’s a tiny bit shy of my goal, but not half bad! I left some wiggle room at the end of the month, so I think I might actually make it! 

This is an entirely different approach to writing for me. With Falling for the Villain, I edited constantly as I wrote, but in this first draft of the sequel, I’m not allowed to do any editing whatsoever. The focus is just write, write, write! I’m even using something called a Freewrite tablet which makes it literally impossible to edit. 

I hope it will work out well…