Concluding

There's nothing quite like finishing at the last minute. I have about 6000 words to go to hit the 50000, and 3 days (including today, as I never get to write until after the kids are in bed). Do-able, I think. I was always finishing the last problems on my homework just as class was starting, so why should this be any different?

I certainly have enough material floating around in my head. Assuming I keep going, I'll probably make it well beyond the 50k, hopefully closer to the 80-100k that would be considered a full-length novel. At the moment, I have two relatively major scenes that aren't written at all (what I keep callign the "big kiss scene", and any sort of conclusion). Either one of those could easily eat up most of that 6000 words, based on some of the other pieces of the book. There is a lot of connective material that's missing also. Even though I think I may have a "full-length novel", I'm still not actually making any plans for publishing. I realized recently that I may have to re-read my employment agreement before I could even submit it to a publisher, were I so inclined. I've got lots to do before I make that decision anwyay (like write it, and then read it to see if it might even make sense to anyone else).

Overall, I am not that stressed by the whole exercise, which is kind of a surprise to me. I've been able to write only about 1-2 hours a day (after bedtime, like I said, with some exceptions), and I've made pretty steady progress throughout. I was interrupted early on with Trystan being sick and not sleeping for like a week, and his doctor visit morphing into an ER visit for something that was unrelated to the cold (that was NOT fun). I am still expecting to take advantage of some of the wait time on the 29th and 30th while he's in surgery to at least finish my word count and earn my nifty icon. I'm kind of hoping to get a large chunk post-NaNo done over the next week while he's in the hospital--I'll probably be there with him most of that time too, and previous experience has shown that I may have long periods of time on my hands. I might also have an upset baby on my hands (literally on) for large chunks of that, so maybe I'll end up catching up on movie watching instead. Either way, the laptop's going to get a workout.

Maybe it helps that I don't have long in front of the keyboard, so I am typing pretty much the entire time--I have to do all the plotting ahead of time, or as I'm writing. The idea for this storyline has been stuck in my head for probably two years now, so I guess it's had time to digest into soemthing I could write down. I have to say, it's a major relief to be getting these people out of my brain.

Now I just have to decide which version of the ending I'm going with, and how exactly to get them together for that big kiss scene, without repeating what they've already done. Hmmm...