I’ve been meaning to write a book, a follow up to Magickal Connections, for years now. But it’s a daunting task, and I couldn’t get my ‘handle’, my thesis if you will. Then in late March I realized I had the title and all at once the whole outline came to me.

(Sometimes I hate my muse, but she’s kickass when she comes through.)

The hard part about writing a book is, well, the writing. It just takes time. Moreover, I would be re-visiting topics I’d already written about previously, so I needed to make it fresh. This would involve a lot of research on my part. I figured I’d need to put together 100,000 words to maybe edit down to a good 70,000. (How much is that? Well, a page of text in a basic font is about 250 words, so 400 pages to start with.)

A friend recommended that I join her writing group because they were just going to be doing Camp NaNoWriMo. (For those who don’t know, NaNoWriMo is an event in November in which would-be fiction authors are encouraged to just write 1000 words every day, to get that crucial 30k words actually on page, and then go back later and do editing and rewrites.

I decided it would be a good focus for me, signed up and got started. The first weekend I got more than 8200 words — a gorgeous explosion. The other group members were annoyed, perhaps even a bit jealous. I tried to calm them by pointing out that I likely wouldn’t be writing at all during the week, so weekends were my prime time. Sure enough, just a few hundred words more came out on Monday night, but by 10 days in I’d managed just over 11k words, and a few days later, got my count over 13k words.

. . .

Then my stepfather died and things went unplanned and unforeseen. I wrote other things, but not my book, and two weeks rolled by.

Then, on Day 26 with only a few days remaining, I pulled myself together, and added about 2500 words.

On Day 28, the husband worked in the evening, and more than 8k words poured out of me.

On the last day, with hours to spare, I rolled over 30k words and achieved a goal.

Me being me, I still need to get to 100k, but I’ve made a sizeable contribution towards achieving my end goal, and I’m proud of myself.

edit: I broke 60k words before the end of May Day.