Continuing on toward the end of the story

Well, it's not Nanowrimo anymore, but I'm still working on the story. I'm basically just one big scene from the end, though it may turn into several more scenes of aftermath. They're now at the point of the big climactic ritual that I've been building toward since they set foot in Aunlania.

And I'm now at 53,312 words. Tonight I finished the scene I'd started last Thursday; basically I got distracted by a bout of temporary insanity completely unrelated to writing fiction, but I think I'm getting past that now. So the rest of that scene netted me 1200 words. Then I went back and changed the ending of another scene, adding another 300 or so, making it around 1500 new words for the evening.

Overall, even though my wordcount hasn't been as high as the past couple years, it was a good Nanowrimo. I have a story that is almost all "right" - and the stuff that needs fixing is relatively minor. This is much different from my previous two attempts. The very first version only barely got past 20k words, and that was already stretching things. It just felt wrong the entire time I was doing it. The second version got to nearly 54k words, and more of it felt right than wrong, which is how I got that far - but eventually the total weight of major things wrong dragged it to a stop.

Which means that I basically followed the same process as I do for writing supershort stories in the form of roleplay posts. I write a first draft, then rearrange it into a second draft, then tweak the second draft to death. Then I dump the whole thing and write a third draft from a completely different starting point than the first two, using material from the second draft as content fodder. This can take anywhere from four hours to a week.

Apparently when it's a novel, it's the same process, but it takes three years. I'm discarding a total of 74,296 past words, though I'll probably go back and cannibalize chunks of the second draft later on when I flesh out some of the character bits that aren't directly relevant to the main plotline. There were some really nice scenes that I'm hoping to use somehow.

This year the story is still dragging me along. I didn't think I was going to get back to it, but then I sat down and my brain demanded that I start writing. So I did, and I'm glad I did. :)