NaNoWriMo, Day 30: Words for Good Measure

For some reason, I just got this thought in my head: Entenmann's Crumb-Topped Donuts.

There was just no shaking it. I decided at least a week ago that my last night of writing would involve these treacherously terrible "pastries." I became addicted to them back in the eighties while working at a recording studio in NYC — the engineer who was my mentor got me hooked. I've probably been clean and sober for 15 years, but I decided to gleefully fall off the wagon to help me push through the final night of NaNoWriMo. Of course, what I didn't know at the time was that I would already be past my goal, but when it came down to last night, I had thought about those damned donuts for so long that I still needed to eat them.

They come in boxes of eight; I consumed four. Along with four cups of coffee.

Yes, you might think, with that kind of nutritional input, that I churned out about, oh, 30,000 words of complete and utter drivel last night. But actually, the words didn't come easily, largely because I was running out of places in my story where I could really write freely without bumping into one of my "I have no idea what's happening here" roadblocks. I was doing a lot of jumping around last night: I tacked some stuff on to the end . . . I added a section I had thought about near the beginning . . . I found a conversation in an Italian eatery that was left unfinished and filled in those holes . . .

And then, I succumbed to the thing that all desperate NaNovelists do: I started a sex scene. Hey, I just couldn't help it. I mean, it felt right. And my female character was giving me every sign that it was okay, that it's what she wanted. We never ended up consummating the act . . . I was distracted by a late-night phone call, and when I came back, well, the character and I just weren't in the mood anymore. So, instead, Walt headed over to the Whitneys to help with the Christmas tree trimming, and here were the last words I wrote, at 11:50 p.m. last night, as my six-year-old character was putting ornaments on a 12-foot tree: "She saved her favorites for herself, even remarking on the ones she remembered from last year."

And that was that. I converted the file to a Word document, copied it into NaNoWriMo's word validator, hit "Submit," and at 11:57 p.m., less than three minutes before the validators were shut down, I ended up with a total of 56,175 words.

As I said, I'm going to continue to work on this until the first draft is done before I take a good, long break from it. But I'm going to take a mini-break this weekend, because we have one of the most insane weekends ever, and I'm going to try not to think much about this until Monday.

I have some thoughts on the whole NaNoWriMo experience too, in case any of you were thinking about doing this in 2008, but I'll save that for my next post. And then . . . thank God . . . I won't be bloging about NaNoWriMo again for a long time!