The weird thing is, once I broke 50,000, I wasn’t on deadline anymore. Once I broke 50,000, it didn’t really matter how many words I wrote tonight. There was no reason for me to keep up the breakneck pace I’ve followed all month, much less exceed it.

But I got carried away anyhow — this stretch contained a big, climactic scene, and one that I felt intensely personal about. My total word count today was in the neighborhood of 3,000 words — almost twice the 1,667 that is a NaNoWriMo participant’s daily goal, and 10 times what I needed to break 50,000 after yesterday’s performance.

I think I can wrap up this draft over the weekend — if not tomorrow, then Sunday. Then I will set it aside for a bit and come back to it later in December. There is major rewriting to do. But I will do the rewrite this time. After the 2004 NaNoWriMo, I set the manuscript aside for the whole month of December. When I looked at my manuscript in the cold light of January, I decided it wasn’t marketable and haven’t really done anything with it since. This one may not be marketable either, but it’s unique enough that I feel like I need to at least try.

I was at 50,127 words when I updated my profile and triggered the “winner” page of the web site. I will continue to work and update my official word count this evening. The word count will be frozen at midnight tonight as far as NaNoWriMo is concerned. I don’t know whether I can wrap up my story tonight or not; if not, I will just finish it over the weekend.

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.

Almost there….

Yo soy en fuego.

This was fun to write. Tonight, I took my characters on a van ride from Nariobi to a lookoff point atop the Great Rift Valley, across the Kenyan countryside and to the safari lodge where they will have debrief for their mission trip.

I think I may end up having to go a little past 50,000 to finish my story — which is a good thing, in terms of the final marketability, if any, of the story. And NaNoWriMo doesn’t care, as long as I write 50,000 words by midnight Friday.

Tonight was fun — a passage of the story that I thought I was going to have to rush through turned out to have several nice moments in it, moving the plot along to what happens next.

One of my two first-draft beta testers left me a message on our Scrabulous game that she was enjoying the few chapters I sent her a while back. I haven’t heard from the other one, but it’s been a holiday week, and I’m sure people had more important things to worry about than reading.

I am having a great time writing this novel, and I’m on track to hit 50K this week. I’m not sure if my story will conveniently end at 50K or whether I will have to keep writing a day or two longer; it depends on what happens to my main character during the mission team’s debrief at the safari park.

The story has been tremendously cathartic for me; I told a co-worker last week that it’s making me intensely “homesick” for another Africa trip. Like my 2004 story, which was also sort of cathartic, I’m not sure if this one will turn out to be marketable or not. I meant for the novel to draw a lot on my real-life experiences, and I think they’ve added some nice detail, but I’m not sure the basic plot per se is going to turn out to be strong enough to appeal to a general audience. There’s also a matter of tone; it may be too frank in some places for the Christian fiction market, but too religious for the general fiction market. Then again, maybe I’m overthinking things and should just trust that people will be able to enjoy the manuscript for what it is.

If I don’t find the manuscript to be marketable in the traditional sense, I could always set it up and offer it on CafePress or some similar service as a publish-on-demand product.

Today, with a little extra time, I not only wrote from the bottom of the story but went back and fixed a couple of minor plot holes, and moved one passage that I had written in the past day or two to a place earlier in the novel where it made more sense.

When I get done with this NaNoWriMo draft, I’ll probably set it aside for a few weeks and pick it back up after Christmas or after the first of the year. There’s some major editing that will need to be done with it. There are several characters that have been poorly developed, and I need to give them more dialogue and more business.

I also need to look at the structure of the novel. As I’ve blogged before, a relatively large chunk of the novel is given to travel and in-country training before they actually begin their work in Kenya. This was intentional; it’s part of the point of the novel to show how these preliminary experiences are all part of the trip. But will the reader become impatient?

Anyway, now is not the time to answer those questions. My concern now is writing 1,667 words a day for the next five days.

Well, I was just slightly ahead of my 1,667 words today, and since I was ahead of pace when I stopped yesterday, I’m still ahead of pace today.

I need to start thinking about how exactly I’m going to wrap some things up. But then again, I think my characters may surprise me between now and the end of the month. It’s happened before.

Guess what? I’m now ahead of pace again! Something else to be thankful for….

Our big family Thanksgiving meal will not be until Saturday, because that’s when the various components of the family could get together. My boss has been kind enough to give me the day off from my normal Saturday responsibilities.

Today, I went over to my parents’ house and Mom got my grandmother out of the nursing home. We had shepherd’s pie for lunch, with fudge pie a la mode for dessert.

A good day, but a low-key one. Tonight, I’m back to work on the novel, and meanwhile flipping back and forth between three terrific movies: “The Incredibles,” “The Greatest Show on Earth” and “March of the Penguins.”

Title	Content
Movie:	The Greatest Show on Earth
Director:	Cecil B. DeMille
Release Date:	19 December 1952 (Sweden) / Other Countries
Genre:	Drama / Family / Romance
Tagline:	The Heartbeat Story of Circus People, Filmed with the Cooperation of Ringling Bros. - Barnum and Bailey Circus!
Plot Outline:	The dramatic lives of trapeze artists, a clown, and an elephant trainer against a background of circus spectacle.
User Rating:	2,473 votes, average 6.6 out of 10
Runtime:	152 min
Awards:	Won 2 Oscars. Another 3 wins&4 nominations
Cast:	Betty Hutton, Cornel Wilde, Charlton Heston, Dorothy Lamour ...
Others:	Additional Details Close Move Title Content MPAA: County: USA Language: English Color: Color (Technicolor) Aspect Ratio: 1.37 : 1 Sound: Mono (Western Electric Recording) Company: Paramount Pictures Certification: Australia:PG (TV rating) / Netherlands:12 / Australia:G / USA:Approved (certificate #15440) / Argentina:16 / Chile:18 / Finland:K-16 / Sweden:15 / UK:U (original rating) (cut) / UK:U (video rating) (1988) (uncut) / Canada:PG IMDBTag: Powered by IMDBTag & imdb.com Sound Mix, Aspect Ratio ...
Photos:	N/A
	Powered by IMDBTag

I’ve had a great evening of writing — and it’s only 9:30. I think I’m going to call it a night, but there’s plenty of time for me to get one of those gotta-write-it-down moments between now and bedtime.

The book is, I’m realizing, awfully expository. I’ve spent way too many pages explaining things I saw or heard or felt in Africa, and not enough pages letting my characters just interact with each other. I don’t know whether I’ll actually be able to turn the manuscript into something marketable or not. But now isn’t the time to worry about that. I’m having fun, and I’m catching up to the required pace, and I’m going back to Kenya, vicariously, through my main character. What’s bad about that?

You know, this way, it looks like I’m still pretty close — and I am.

Chart courtesy of the NaNoWriMo application for Facebook.

Well, I had a pretty good evening of noveling tonight. I think I’m at a good stopping point for the evening. I’m still behind, but as long as I’m doing more than 1,667 words I’m trying to catch up, and I did nearly 2,000 today. And it’s progressing well, and I’ve made notes on some things that will happen in the coming pages. I was really discouraged over the weekend and had almost mentally given up on making the goal, but I feel much better now.

I did not catch up the way I wanted to today — I was pretty tired and took a nap this afternoon, and didn’t feel up to going to the non-denominational Community-wide Thanksgiving service this evening. But I did make some progress — 3,000 words, which is not bad for a day’s work.

The need to keep pushing forward has some interesting side effects. As I have said, the point of NaNoWriMo is not that this draft be any good, and in some cases it definitely isn’t. My draft has been way over-expository; too often, I explain things as the narrator instead of letting my characters’ actions and dialogue demonstrate or suggest them.

But today, I had the opposite problem — I arrived at what needed to be a dramatic encounter, and I really didn’t have everything I needed to do the scene justice. (This particular plot point is not based on my individual trip experience.) I sort of rushed through it because I didn’t know what else to say about it. If and when I go back and rewrite this thing, I’ll have to do some actual research.

Well, this is roughly where I should have been two days ago. I did make some good progress today. I need to do more tonight but my brain is fried and I’m not sure I can. I don’t have anything other than church on the schedule for tomorrow, and so hopefully I can make good progress tomorrow as well.