NaNoWriMo 2013- The Freeze is Complete at 50310 Words

This morning at 2:30am, I finished The Freeze, my second NaNoWriMo novel. It's a fantastic feeling, wrapping up a 50k word novel in 30 days, and this time, I did it in 14.  Talk about procrastination.  But it was fun.

Just for fun, here is what my mini descent into the crazy writing frenzy that is NaNoWriMo looked like this year.  Obviously I'm a weekend warrior when it comes to writing, but this time I took it to the extreme. I had a couple of 8k days and even a 10 and 12k day. Coming to the end of one of those is like coming to edge of an insanity cliff and looking over the edge.

NaNoWriMo 2013-The Freeze

I was good and only wrote 3k on Thanksgiving, spending the day cooking and the evening watchin Punkin Chunkin on Discovery with my family.  But on Black Friday I avoided the stores and sales in favor of a pie induced sugar high and a 12k word writing marathon (actually 10k on the 29th and 2k after midnight).  I must have found words for the perfect ending three or four times in those final few hours, only to check my word count and realize my work was not done yet, a symptom of NaNoWriMo. The book isn't over until you reach 50k.

So what did I write about? A frozen future where residents of a city, led by a prepper named Mr. Prowler have taken refuge in an underground tunnel system. A young girl, Andrea, sick of writing sappy, optimistic essays for what the adults call school, decides to try her luck on one of Mr. Prowler's scavenging crews, who go topside to sweep the abandoned city for cast off supplies and materials.  With the help of a boy she likes who happens to be Mr. Prowler's son, she joins the team as Chaz.  But getting on the team isn't at all what she expected and she soon finds herself separated from the team, lost in the frozen city and alone.

NaNoWriMo 2012- Fearless (The Zombie Logs)

Of course, this year I knew I could do it. This wasn't my first trip down this road, and last year I spent 20 of the 30 days of NaNoWriMo delving into my version of the zombie apocalypse. Why? Not because I like zombies or zombie stories. Quite the opposite in fact. I wrote Fearless (The Zombie Logs) to combat the desire to hide out in the computer room whenever my husband watched The Walking Dead. It was therapeutic. It was also fun, sad, and the first book that actually had a scene that brought tears to my eyes when I wrote it. I also gave myself some writing constraints just to make it a bit more interesting. One, I never say the word zombie anywhere in the book. Two, the whole thing is written as a journal from the perspective of a young woman who managed to survive the outbreak and who finds herself the leader of a small band of survivors. Three, I only name three characters over the course of the book, though to hit my word count I did a run down of who's who at the very end. Still, I surprised myself.  Even with all these constraints, the characters took on realistic identities, humor and tragedy blossomed from the pages, and I even managed to fit in a little romance.  

The downside, though, was that I had a totally weird timeline since I didn't have a calendar out when I wrote it.  I'm working on taming that timeline in my current editing run for this book. In fact, I've got everything labeled with the correct date and now I'm just running through it making sure I haven't talked about it being Christmas in the middle of April or Thanksgiving in the middle of October.  Details, details. 

That's all for now. I'm giving myself the rest of the day off to recover.  Tomorrow? Well, tomorrow I'm back to editing. 

Did any of you NaNoWriMo this year? If so, share your experiences with it in the comments.  What was your best word count day? How much caffiene did you ingest? Etc. Etc.

While you're at it check out MichaelSciFan's interview with me and enter to win a free ecopy of Forgotten Valor.

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