Success - day 30

50,278 words so far  

In case anyone was wondering, it is possible to rush 4000-5000 words of a novel on a school day when you have an IPLE paper to mass edit/finish. All before midnight.
Actually I finished at 11:40 something.

Definitely not as dramatic as my first NaNoWriMo, where I literally put in just over 50,000 words at 11:59pm (I was shaking in my bedroom from excitement), but still very adrenaline rushing.

Now for the whole noveling business...

First of all, I need a title for this new story. This is always a problem for me. A lot of people ask me, "if you're a novelist, why do you hate titles so much?" I just do. Noveling is a lot of expansion. It's difficult, for me at least, to condense everything -- emotions, tone, plot, etc. -- of a chapter into a few words, much less the contents of an entire novel into one title. Runaway had chapter titles. After that book, I gave up and fondly title them all "Chapter 1, 2, 3..." As for the book title, I grab a random word that shortens the idea of the book and it just sticks. Runaway is definitely better than "the book where four girls run away for a year." SQuared is infinitely better, and I guess catchier, than "that book with the squared numbers and roots." Perhaps I should just do that again, although I do not seem to be as attached to this story as I was to my previous two books..... Might have something to do with the length (this one is probably half as long as Runaway).

For some odd reason, I also hate coming up with character names and I hate coming up with titles. For Runaway, all my character names were from an online website with specific meanings attached to them, so no biggie there. But for SQuared. Oh my goodness. All my names were provided by my friend, Fanny. Even the name "Luvelle", which she entirely made up off the top of her head and is now one of my favorite names.

But looking back, I think I should take a break from noveling. For one thing, I don't read very much when I'm writing -- I don't want the authors' writing style to influence mine. Also, I really need to be focusing on college apps. Noveling makes me far too fluffy and descriptive of a writer, which isn't good when I only get 200-500 words per supplemental essay.

We'll see. I said this exact same thing after I finished SQuared, and I still ended up doing NaNoWriMo again anyway.

oh the joy of winning. Even if it is a clash of your will/determination against common sense and time.

and now to sleep