NaNoWriMo 2014 – I made it!!

Current word count: 50,029
Word count goal 27th day: 45,009

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It’s Thanksgiving Day here in the United States, when people celebrate friends, family and things they were thankful for over the year.

I ended up spending most of it on the couch trying to figure out what was up with my laptop computer.

Two days ago Microsoft pushed the latest update to Windows 10 Technical Preview. Up until then I was having no problems at all. Now the keyboard is acting like it has a mind of its own, and I have to keep an eagle eye out for when it jumps back several characters into what I’ve previously written and deletes, or overwrites the recent characters.

I tried an external USB keyboard to see if that would work and, sure enough, it works just fine.

This either means a problem with the driver for the built-in keyboard, or the keyboard is dying. Not good, though I could understand it as I use this computer way more than it was probably ever designed to be used.

External keyboard in hand, I was able to move onto capturing the 1800 words needed to accomplish the real topic of this blog entry, my winning NaNoWriMo!! Still hard to believe it. But, I did it in 27 days.

To refresh your memory winning NaNoWriMo means writing a 50,000 word novel in 30 days. Not sure what this year’s stats look like. But, last year only 17% of the 300,000+ participants accomplished that task.

There were times when the words flowed like water. While there were other times when it felt like pulling teeth. Still, only two days out of the 27 did I write less than the 1667 average I needed to complete the task by month’s end.

This year I wrote historical fiction so I couldn’t stray too far from what actually happened. I’ve already decided that next year will be some type of science fiction, paranormal, horror, alternative history type of piece where I can write pretty much whatever I want as it flows from my mind.

I’ve got some ideas already on electronic paper courtesy of some dreams I had lately. But, I think I’ll keep them to myself for now till I actually decide which to use. I’ll definitely make sure to have outlined and planned a lot better than this year when it was a case of research, write, research, write, and repeat.

This year’s book is hardly finished though. I’m guessing it’s going to take another 50,000 words, or so, to finish the first draft. Then it’s time to revise and polish. Don’t expect to see Bullets and Borscht gracing the digital shelves of Amazon and Barnes & Noble any time soon.

Now it’s time to return to figuring out what’s up with this keyboard because I can’t afford a new laptop, and lugging around an external keyboard would be for the birds.