When last we left our heroes, I had decided to keep working on my book using Nanowrimo’s interface for accountability, but not beat myself up for not being able to work at their breakneck pace for a month on a novel that’s already taken me more than 20 years. I decided a more sane and sustainable pace would be 60,000 words in 60 days.

In the end, I wrote about 55,000 words in two months. I was ahead of the curve when the semester started, then classes took over my brain. I had a brief return to glory when my school gave us a week off, but when I had to go back to school, I had to shut down my writing brain. I stopped a tantalizing scene and a half from the finish line: it’s RIGHT THERE, and I simply can’t work on it anymore until we go on break.

Writing out the plot beats for each character turned out to be the secret weapon for this book, particularly because this has always been a book about a self-centered young person who learns to love and communicate with people vastly different from themselves. I needed to think through what those other characters wanted in those early scenes where the main character is oblivious to them, and it means those characters are much more compelling all the way through.

I’m hoping that once I get my feet under me, I can finish off the first draft, use November to go back over what I’ve written and clean it up (for one thing, there’s a lot of timeline/continuity issues I need to settle), and then start showing it to my beta readers this winter.

Here’s hoping I have the strength to take this over the finish line.