S. W. Raine

Well, NaNoWriMo is almost over, and I’m currently sitting at a little over 46,000 words out of 50,000.

I used to be notoriously around 10,000 words behind on the very last day, frantically spending all day typing away like mad. But that’s when I was doing it alone. Once I joined the Detroit community, it became rare that I wasn’t finished by this time of the month.

If you don’t know what NaNoWriMo is, it stands for National Novel Writing Month. It’s a challenge to write a 50,000-word novel in 30 days.

This is my 18th year participating, and I’m on track to make it my 17th win. But it wasn’t easy getting this far.

My goal this year was to do a rewrite of part 3 of my Elementals trilogy. Part 1, The Elemental’s Guardian, released earlier this year in February. I originally wrote part 1 during NaNoWriMo 2011, and parts 2 and 3 together during NaNoWriMo 2013.

I rewrote part 2 during NaNoWriMo 2022, but it needed a lot of work. While my early readers loved the storyline of The Elemental’s Guardian, I received a lot of the same complaint: the pacing was too slow in the beginning. So because I was aware of the slow pacing, I’d also noticed it in part 2 when I did my revision, and my suspicions were confirmed when my alpha readers reported back the same thing.

Unfortunately, my year was pretty rough, which meant I was very behind on where I wanted to be with the novel. It also meant I wasn’t going to have it finished in time before starting the rewrite of part 3. That made it a little confusing, especially when I couldn’t remember at what point things happened in book 2 to connect them to book 3.

I started the month out strong regardless, but then hit a wall on the 8th. I had a massive case of imposter syndrome, where I just thought my NaNo story was crap, the entire trilogy was crap, and I was a crap author. Thankfully, those thoughts didn’t last too long, but my story still suffered because of it.

Also, there was a rather large and important issue that arose from the depths of the organization that needed the board, of all people, to be brought in to investigate, which took a pretty big hit to my mental health and made me question my involvement in the challenge altogether. The investigation is still ongoing, and since I like to understand all sides, I’ll wait to reserve judgement, but it took a while for me to mentally be able to write again. All that cushion I’d built up was gone, and I struggled to get words down.

This isn’t the rewrite I’d originally wanted. This rewrite will need yet another rewrite, but that won’t happen until after part 2 is finished. And while it was a hard pill to swallow, I finally came to terms with it. In the meantime, I’m happy to see where my characters take me, which is completely different from the way I’d originally wrote it.

So my goal is to continue to write what’s needed to get me to 50,000 words and just enjoy writing. Because really, that’s what NaNoWriMo is for me: a fun challenge to allow my pantser tendencies to roam free.

Raine