Winner of Nanowrimo 2008!

It’s official: I got to 50,000 words by November 30th, and it even draws to an end (kind of). I had to pull a few Nanowrimo-approved dirty tricks to get safely across the finish line, of course, but what matters is I got there in the end, having written every word of it.

But that doesn’t mean the work is over just yet.

I might be done with it for the purposes of winning Nanowrimo, but for the purposes of real life, the manuscript doesn’t quite qualify as a completed first draft. You see, in order to reach the magic number, I had to throw out all pretense at seriousness and character development (never mind story). To give you an idea how far things deteriorated, I’ll just say that the novel started with my main character in mortal danger. It ended with all the characters getting together to have a party (with cake, no less) in my main character’s jail cell. Yay!

But that’s why the gods invented the first week of December.

So while I’ve got the momentum, I’m going to spend most of next week applying certain key revisions before I forget what needs to be done:

Item the first: undo the dirty tricks I pulled in the first 40k to boost the word count to that number. Top tasks: remove the song lyrics overheard on the radio. Remove the forced confessions, which involved verbatim repetition of earlier sections. Re-contract the un-contracted contractions (e.g. “do not” can once more become “don’t”).

Item the second: Delete last 10,000 words or so and write a better ending.

On the Nanowrimo forums there was a thread inviting readers to share their first and last lines. It’s pretty amusing: check it out here. And let me share my own contribution:

First line: “Right before everything went to shit, I was getting drunk on wine over at Vinny’s place up in Little Saigon, waiting for Tony the Stamp to show up so we could do our business and get on with our separate lives.”

Last line: “The cake was delicious.”

Mmm. Cake.

posted: 08 November 30
under: Open Folio