I’m officially a winner of NaNoWriMo 2023!

That’s right. I hit 50,000 words around 11:00 pm this evening.

I had intended to take the day off and give myself a creative break. I spent most of the day rereading some of my favorite romance books. Mostly for inspiration. Some because I wanted to remember how other authors handled certain scenes or how they wrote dialogue. Then I nearly forgot that I signed up for a Smithsonian Associates program called Autumn Harvest: Reflections Writing Workshop lead by Mary Hall Surface. (I highly recommend this program, which she’s doing a repeat of on November 14 if you want to catch it.)

That program lasted 90 minutes. When it was over, I again considered just taking the night off from writing. I was way head on word count. Plus, you know when you are getting close to the end of a really good book. And you want to know what happens but you also don’t want it to end so you try to slow down. That’s how I was feeling about Hollow Creek (my working title). I want to finish it. I wanted to hit 50,000 words. But at the same time, I didn’t want it to end.

Then I looked at my word count stats. Yesterday was such a stellar writing day for me and I was soooo close to 50K. Just a bit over 7,700 words away. So I told myself, I would write for one hour just to get that much closer to 50,000.

So I sat down and wrote for an hour.

At the end of that hour, I felt really good about the progress I made. I logged about fifteen hundred words. It was not quite 8:00 pm. I told myself I could keep writing a bit more.

Another hour went by and I logged another two thousand words.

Now I’m seeing that 7,700 word gap narrow by half and I wasn’t finished with the scene I was writing. So I told myself I would finish that scene.

When I stopped this time, I logged nearly three thousand words.

My 7,700 word gap between where I was yesterday and the NaNoWriMo goal of 50,000 words had narrowed to just 1,400 words. That’s all I had left to reach 50K. I remember looking at the clock and it was 10:10 pm. I told myself I would could write 1,400 words before midnight.

At 11:12 pm, I finished the scene I was writing. I looked at the word count and entered it into the spreadsheet. The cumulative word count column read 50,058. I double checked. I triple checked.

I had hit 50K!

Now the story isn’t actually finished. I have the opening with them meeting. I have the getting to know you and falling in love romantic bits. I have the conflict. I have the HEA ending. What I need now is the grand gesture. I have the start of it or at least the set-up. But I have to figure out how my main character is going to win back his love after screwing up royally (he lied by omission—big oops!). And he’s on a deadline (midnight New Year’s Eve). But exactly how he’s going to convince her to even listen to him, I haven’t quite figured out.

I’m thinking something a la 10 Things I Hate About You’s “sacrifice yourself on the altar of dignity.” Then again, maybe something a little more subtle would work better.

We’ll see how it goes.

I do plan to keep on writing the rest of the month because I do want to finish this story. I admit that in 2017, I “won” NaNoWriMo by hitting 50,000 words, but that story is unfinished. It was a SciFi genre and would be, if I ever pick it back up, more along the lines of close to 100,000 words. I really only wrote about half of it.

But for this story, I’ve written so much, have so many ideas, and have thought of taking this story in a different direction, I actually considered writing everything down, then breaking it into two separate stories. And then just creating new characters so as to fit the characters with the plots.

All that to say that I have more writing in my future. So stay tuned the rest of November as I continue updating my NaNoWriMo progress.