Can you believe there are only 2 days left in November? It seems just yesterday I started this crazy writing journey. Now here we are, almost at the finish line.

As I wrote in my last post, my story is basically finished. It’s a rough first draft and needs a ton of editing. Mostly because I changed some things mid-way through writing. Like the female main character’s name, which I still don’t like. And I’ll probably change it again.

The biggest change is the ending.

I started to write a more traditional romance ending, but got stuck on how to do the grand gesture. And then thought, huh? What if I did something a bit different. Maybe a slightly unexpected twist. So I wrote an alternate ending, which has kind of become the actual ending since I never wrote the more traditional ending.

However, the more traditional ending is still floating around my head, so I may write it down as the new alternate ending and decide later which ending I like better. Maybe I’ll post them both and let people vote on their favorite ending. Who knows?

What I do know is that with this alternate ending, I need to go back and fix a lot of the earlier chapters to make it work. I started doing just that, which is why, in the last week or so, my word count updates have been in the mid-hundreds instead of 1,667+ words. I’ve been reading the earlier chapters, filling in some details, and then fixing some of the consistency issues.

What I really need to do is to print out the entire thing and make edits the old fashioned way—with a pen (but not a red pen because no one likes the dreaded red pen). I need to see the entire story in it’s entirety instead of the piecemeal chapters I have it currently broken into in Scrivener.

Then again, I may not do anything with the story. It may stay in my writing file along with all the other stories and partial stories I’ve written. I do NaNo for the fun of it. Not with any expectation or hope of publishing. I write fiction (and a bit of poetry) as an outlet for myself.

But . . . I have made one exception this time. My friend G has now offered more than a handful of times to read the story. And G isn’t one to offer something without meaning it. And even thought I warned G that it was a rough draft, that it really wasn’t that great, G still has offered. So today, I went downloaded Hollow Creek into a PDF and emailed it to G (with a warning that it’s a rough first draft that needs a lot of editing). Of course, I nearly instantly regretted it but it was too late.

Now my stomach is in knots knowing that someone will actually read my story. Although, G is super nice, and so I’m not sure G would say anything negative.

Then again, the fact that G would be nice about it might actually might be worse than brutal honesty.

That’s a bit of a neurotic reaction, right?

Yes, it totally is. And that is the spiraling way my brain is churning right now. The fact is that I would accept someone saying “this story sucks” over someone genuinely telling me they like it.

I get the weirdness of this. Trust me.

Anyway, that’s where I am. Having anxiety and a bit of a nervous breakdown after I already “won” NaNoWriMo.

In the meantime, I will keep adding bits to the story. Mostly because I want the 30 day badge for updating progress every day and the achieve daily par badge for hitting your daily word count goal every day, which for me right now is 0 since I already hit 50,000 words. Ironically, NaNo doesn’t acknowledge 0 words as an entry for the daily progress, which is another reason why I keep adding a few words here and there. If you enter 0 in the word count, it puts your days in a row counter back to 1. Stupid but true because I tried that.

The things I do to collect meaningless badges. And not even a real badge that I could sew on a sash or a backpack, but an electronic one that’s even more useless.

Anyway, check back on Thursday for my final word count and maybe, just maybe, I’ll share a teeny snippet of the story.