Although at the time of this writing, there's still technically about fifteen hours left of NaNoWriMo, I actually finished my first draft yesterday. However, at only thirty one thousand words, I didn't (technically) win this year's contest. (And no, I'm not going to try and write nineteen thousand words today.)

Although I didn't win at NaNo, I did win at life. Because my goal wasn't to just barf fifty thousand words into a word processor. My goal was to finish a rough draft of my latest novel. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end. But it also has a lot of "insert stuff here" or "jump ahead to the next plot point there". The goal was never to create anything that anyone could read and enjoy. The goal was to write an extremely long and detailed synopsis. If I liked that, then I would take the time to write a proper draft of the story.

My current guess is the manuscript will double in size (so, around sixty-two thousand words) and the next draft will take about three months. The goal of the second draft is to fix plot and pacing problems, not to mention filling in all those "content goes here" notes. The third draft will be the polish pass and I'll call it done.

I think I may have something here. Stay tuned.

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