November draws to a close and so it is time for me to reveal the results of my personal NaNoWriMo challenge (read more here: https://www.iveyink.com/blog/2018/10/30/lets-go-wri-mo ).
On Wednesday evening, I sat down to write my daily scene, struggling to find a snippet that still needed to be written that would be long enough for me to consider it complete (I was thinking 500-1000 words, but I have some good solid scenes I wrote that were only in the 400's). But on opening the separate document that I had been writing these scenes in, I discovered that at 24 days of writing (I missed 2 days, and one day I wrote a scene for another novel in progress, Brinyor) the document stood at a hulking 31 pages.
Looking at this, and looking back at my much-crossed out "scenes to write" list, I said, "Hmm... Maybe rather than struggling to find more scenes to pound out just for the sake of being able to say I wrote up through the 30th, I should instead stop while I have good material that I need and change gears."
So what's next?
I am in the process of rereading and making minor edits to the new scenes that I have written. For the month of December (which is a month that I'm always pressed for time), I will work on editing and planning for Wolf and Sheath, as well as working on short story submissions.
For W and S, I have some new scenes in addition to the ones from this month that need to be inserted into the main document. I need to look at those in conjunction with these new ones and see what needs to be put where. Does that mean that my 86 page novel will now be 117 pages? Well, no. Some of the new scenes that I have written were to replace really clunky telling-not-showing exposition that I wrote lo these many years ago. But some of it is also completely new material. We'll see what the updated word and page count are in a few weeks.