How did your Nanowrimo go?  I sailed past the 50K-word goal early — for the first time ever — but that involved incorporating some things that were already written.  My goal on this project is to get a full first draft done by the end of the year.  I expect it’s going to run about 90K when I finish the rough, which needs to be edited down under 70K by mid-February. Nanowrimo helped me get 54K of that locked in already.

I can’t tell you the name of the project yet — the publisher has asked I hold off until January, when it will be available for preorder.

I can tell you this:  I am really very extremely excited about it.  See, an editor contacted me in September to ask if I might have an interest in writing a travel guide to cemeteries.  I told her I had been thinking along those lines for a while. The more we talked, more certain I was that I can DO this project. I am the woman for the job.  I have never felt so capable of accomplishing anything so big in my life.

This realization is huge for me. I don’t talk a lot about my insecurities here, but …  I spend a part of every year wondering why I don’t get a real job like a normal person.  This year, that drama lasted about a week before this editor got in touch.  Once again, I feel rescued by writing.

It took the better part of the last two months to iron out the contract, but that has been done now.  I’ve turned in my table of contents for the project and my editor is going over it.  Once she’s come back to me with her notes, I am going to put my head down and grind out the rest of the book.

So once again, I am grateful to Nanowrimo:  for the daily word goal, for the community, for the write-ins, for the writers writing alongside me.  I am grateful for the website:  I can’t tell you how much I enjoy seeing that bar graph grow day by day. I am grateful for the silliness and the support and the cheerleaders.

Nanowrimo helped me bang out this table of contents and my wordy first draft while I was fretting daily about writing without a contract, while I sweated the contract’s terms and negotiated on my own behalf.  Nanowrimo gave me a purpose, a goal, a place to be every day. It gave me a target to hit, something I could control in the face of everything I could not.

Nanowrimo really is the best thing since sliced bread.