NaNoWriMo 2009: The First Draft Is Finished!

This is a month of NaNoWriMo firsts for me. First, I wrote my 50,000th word in my long 11,000-word Friday the 13th session that lasted well into the morning of the 14th. That counts as the first time I've ever won a WriMo (one that's not FAWM or Script Frenzy, anyway) early, without a Panic Time. Here's another first: I've completed the first draft of a novel for the first time in my life! What's more, I finished it on November 21, just three weeks into NaNoWriMo!

A little background: I've been doing NaNo since 2006. I've been a three-time come-from-behind winner. That streak is broken: not the win streak, but the come-from-behind win streak (early wins don't count as come-from-behinds). None of the novels from those previous years yet have a complete first draft. This means I still have to work on Bad Company (from '07), Black Science (from '06), New Flesh (from '08), and The Jennifer Theory (also from '06), along with Spanner from Script Frenzy '08 (a script I still need to heavily revise before I can continue it next year). Not a single one of those projects is anywhere close to finished, even in the first draft.

After NaNo '07, I continued writing Bad Company for NaNoFiMo, JanNoWriMo, FebNoWriMo (at NaNoPubYe), NaNoEdMo, MayNoWriMo (also at PubYe), JulNoWriMo, and AugNoWriMo. I had such trouble trying to wrestle the difficult plot into shape that I actually burned out on the first day of AugNo '08 and didn't touch a computer until the final week of NaNo '08, when during my ultimate Panic Time I wrote over 54,000 words in the final week and 13,000 words on the next to last day (11/29/08). I'll be returning to BadCo for its last NaNoFiMo, which I promise will be the true "BadCoFiMo".

Anyway, I now have a complete first draft. Of a short novel, to be sure (Dirty Pop was partly inspired by Japanese "light novels"). But still, it's the first time I've ever finished a first draft. So I'm going to take a few days off from writing. Later, I'll submit Dirty Pop to Holly Lisle's one-pass editing method. In the meantime, I think I ought to start drawing again...

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