Lake Neuron

Suffice it to say I will be making 50,000.

I am sure I will be able to turn in 50,000 words to NaNoWriMo’s automatic word count validator tomorrow night (or later tonight, if I get a sudden flash of inspiration in the next hour). That will mean that I am a winner of National Novel Writing Month.

I do not, however, know for sure if I can finish the actual story tomorrow night. I am close — very close — but I still have a few little kinks to work out, and the story may run a few thousand words over, depending on how I get there.

I do think that the finished novel will be even longer than that when I go back and rewrite it. I have done a poor job fleshing out some of my characters, and I need to work in some new dialogue, perhaps a few new scenes, to do them justice on the page the way they appear in my mind. But I have a framework to build on — and I think it’s a pretty good framework.

My only fear is that the romance that works through the second half of the novel (which is part of what I’m trying to tie up in the last few pages) won’t be realistic. I’ve had an incredibly stunted social life, and it could be that my ideas about what’s romantic and what could lead to a deeper relationship are silly and that the novel will read like it was written by the Hardy Boys about Nancy Drew.

I think too much. I need to relax and enjoy the prospect of crossing the finish line.

Tags: NaNoWriMo, Novel