NaNoWriMo- the Final Days

Well... the last 11 days I was behind every single day. No joke. I would catch up occasionally and then the next day I would get behind again. Sometime around days 20-25, I would sit at the dining room table instead of on our Lazy Boy. Wow, what a difference achair can make. It actually had to sit up straight *gasp*. Needless to say, it helped a lot. I also did some "Nuclear Weekend" (See No Plot? No Problem! by Chris Baty) type writing where I set the timer for forty minutes and wrote as long/fast as I could and then take a twenty minute break. I repeated this process until I made it to 1500 words. Then, take a long break (eat a meal, watch TV, read a book, talk to actual people, etc.) and do it again with another 1500 words. Then take a break. Then write again. So, I did this a few times (even though I usually only did it twice in a day rather than three times) and it helped a lot.

The last five days of NaNo ended up being pretty interesting. We were staying at a little house in New Braunfels where there was no internet access. That was sad for a couple of reasons: no e-mail, no blogging, no research for the book. But, it ended up helping a lot. On day 27 I had approximately 14,000 words left. I wrote about 3,500 on that day, 4,500 on day 28, 2,000 on day 29, and 4,000 words on day 30. It was a killer and I doubt the last 14,000 words of my book are all that great. But they are written and I am a winner with a grand total of 50,004 words.

As far as the story goes (I haven't really blogged about it) here's a synopsis:  It opens with the birth of a girl named Shiloh Ella Smith in a small town in Michigan. Her dad is a Baptist pastor there. Shiloh grew up without even leaving the state. In fact, she never even left her city unless it was for one of the families summer trips to Lake Superior. In high school, she meets a boy named JJ Wilburn. They are friends at first but by the end of high school they are sweethearts. JJ is a year older than Shiloh but as soon as she is old enough, Shiloh goes off to school with JJ that is only a couple of hours from their home (and still in the state). When he graduates college, he proposes to her. She leaves school early to marry him and JJ takes over the preaching at the Baptist church Shiloh's dad was the pastor at. They have four kids, all of them named after cities/countries that Shiloh had wanted to visit. Their names are Sydney Australia, Seoul Korea, Paris France, and Dublin Ireland (in that order). They go to the lake every summer just like Shiloh and her parents did. Shiloh's happiness does not last long enough, though, as she and Dublin both die that summer. JJ shuts down and the remaining three children have to raise themselves. Years later, the three siblings end up traveling the world together to the cities they were named after. On the trip, they find out a lot about each other, their thoughts on the past, and their faith in something bigger than themselves. 

Sorry this post is so late! Thanks for all the support from my family and friends. It was a crazy month but so much fun. This book is going to need a ton of editing but it may take me more than a month the second time around :P

120 pages!