50,300 Little Wins in NaNoWriMo

At 11:50pm on the 21st of November, I completed the NaNoWriMo challenge, writing 50,300 words for my book, Sinblade. I’m not done yet- I still have another 5-10k words to go before I’ll consider the rough draft complete. Here’s my ideal lifecycle for the book:

• Rough Draft: First complete version of the story.
• First Draft: First revised version I send out for people to read. Continuity and plot are checked.
• Second Draft: All first draft changes are merged. English is checked. Plot is evened out. Facts are checked.
• Third Draft: Spell-checking, punctuation, and formatting.
• Fourth Draft: Repeat of third draft with different audience.
• Final Draft: What’s sent to Lulu.com for printing.

My goal is to get the Rough Draft done by December 1st, and that seems a easily reachable goal. Next is to get the First Draft (the first copy to leave the house) out the door for editing and revising by the end of December. I’m not sure how reasonable a goal that will be- I have some catching up to do on my neglected Ruma project. As for the rest of the draft, there are no hard and fast rules- I suspect I’ll be lucky to get to the second draft, let alone the third or fourth.

The end goal is to self-publish through Lulu.com, a print-on-demand book service. This means you’ll be able to buy an actual paperback copy of my book! How cool is that?

Seeing as how it’s now 40 minutes into Thanksgiving, I think I should send out some thanks to those that have helped me:

• Jackie: for bearing with me through another time-consuming project. Hopefully this one will make money.
• Ian: for mostly behaving when I was trying to write.
• VP: for encouraging me to compete in NaNoWriMo with his books, Shining Star and Pulling Strings
• yojimbo, dev_null, mylo, my coworkers, and everyone else who offered to help me: I’ll be taking you up on your offers to help revise 🙂

Thanks again everyone for the support! Wish me luck!

Update: Don’t take this post as an example of my writing- it was 1am.