NanoWrimo goal achieved!

I last made a post just before the National Novel Writing Month of November kicked off.  I guess I can only write one thing at a time.  I did meet my NanoWrimo goal of 50,000 words.  YAY!  It was more difficult than last year because I overextended and agreed to work for 5 days, thus missing my goals for those days - 10,000 words. Gulp.  I managed to make them up and squeaked by at the last minute. 

My novel this year was a quieter one.  Last year, I found myself embroiled in an epic.  It grew larger and larger, kind of like a piece of tofu that I tried once.  I spit out the tofu but the novel lives on, still growing larger and calving into two future novels.  While that is exciting, I decided to experiment with a quieter novel this time.  A contemporary novel with one main character who has life problems to face.  I found it to be less exciting than sending a young man to war, or killing off several people during the influenza epidemic of 1918, but with a quiet novel, it's easier to go deeper into the character and really get to know her in depth.

I attended a class associated with the NanoWrimo month and, together with my classmates, we discussed the problems of writing a novel.  It was fun to hear how other people handled the flow and creative life of a longterm writing project.  My instructor, Kathy, advised us to put the novel away once we had our rough first draft and let it 'percolate' in our minds.  So right now I'm letting my quiet novel percolate while I've started another rough draft of a book that has been in the back of my mind for several years. 

Ideally, this is the start of a continuum of writing and percolating, editing and percolating, writing and percolating.  The object is to continue a process, a neverending yet everchanging process.  I like the sound of that.