NaNoWriWeekFive

Yes, it's that time of year when thousands of word weary novelists emerge blinking into the cold harsh light of reality, sleep deprived but with another first draft under their belts.

And, yes, as you will have gathered, I made it to the required 50,000 words (50,591 in 29 days, for the record), but I'm not sure the novel is finished. I write the final chapter - sort of - but most of the preceding chapters need a lot of doctoring to properly lead up to that point and tell the story I want to tell.

It is, it has to be said, a mess at the moment. The original concept got a little bent out of shape in the process of being written, and a lot of the earlier chapters need to be completely re-written or just dumped entirely; and there are a lot of editorial notes and so on that need to be extracted and turned into fiction somehow, so the whole thing is still a very long way from finished.

This has been, I think, the first time I have attempted to write something of this length without more than a vague idea where it was going, hence the quantity of about turns and footnotes, but despite all that, it shaped up, over the course of the month, to be something I actually like. It changed a little from the original urban fantasy feel when my protagonist finally revealed his back story to me during a 1000 word sprint on my penultimate night of novelling, but starting out with that element of weirdness in it allowed me to get the story down, and I'm fairly confident that with a little work this can be something worthwhile.

Now all that remains is to unlock my inner editor, and set about the second draft...