NaNo Day 25

21 Days Later... oh wait, I was gonna blog about this, wasn't I?

It's been a trip. The second weekend, barely a week in, I fell behind. I skipped a day in favor of going to a comic convention and seeing Thor: The Dark World with friends. I figured I wouldn't have trouble catching up. And then the wall came up. Oh, what a wall. I tried going around it. There was another one just waiting for me from the other angle. So I fell, I sobbed, I moaned, I said "I can't do it anymore, I'm done. This is terrible and I don't want to do it anymore."

You know, the normal Week 2/3 NaNo. But I really was ready to throw in the towel and give up. All my characters were doing was going somewhere and talking, going somewhere else, talking. There wasn't any action, and eventually, I didn't know where they were going anymore. That's where I got stuck. Even if I got unstuck, I was going to get to 30k at most. I was ready to give it all up. And then the pep talk came in. Lev Grossman, never heard of him. Still, couldn't hurt to read it, right?

Thank you, Mr. Grossman. You said all the right things at all the right times. You said exactly what I needed to hear. You told me I wasn't alone, this was normal, and I could get through it. I'd read it a thousand times before, but in that moment of darkness, as the curtain was falling on my novel, you said, "Wait, not yet."

I got up. I looked at the wall from another angle. I went back to the outlining I had been doing before NaNo and started to fill it out. I made a tiny hole in the wall. I went home and wrote. I broke through the first wall and filled in the gap I'd left (the first time I've ever skipped a scene). I went back to the other wall and just kept on going. Last night, I finally caught up on my deficit with a pretty 40,010 word count for the evening. The major subarc just finished, so I have 10k to get the rest of the main arc, which now involves more than I originally intended. My 30k prediction may end up getting me to 50k after all.

So thank you, Mr. Grossman. Thank you for the hand, for the leg up, for the right words at the right time. I'm gonna make it after all.

As long as hosting Thanksgiving for the first time doesn't kill me first.