Nano success! Blogging fail.

With about a week and a half left in November, I completely lost steam on my novel. I was sitting at a pretty 16k with much left to tell but no motivation to tell it.I had pretty much given up.

As a writer, you grow very attached to your characters and their lives. They become a part of you and they're all you think about... almost like children. You want them to be happy and successful. Then there's this realization that their happiness and success is the same as your happiness and success and that is entirely in your hands. It's frightening.

This sounds crazy, but I am afraid to complete a novel. The writing part, I can handle. But what comes next when the story is all told? Here I sat staring at a massive word document telling Abby Drake's story and those familiar feelings from years past started to creep up on me. What was I doing? Why was I wasting my time? What if no one else liked this? What if I failed Abby and in turn myself?

Then, one of my very best friends told me she wanted to and would read it, even if no one else did. And another very close friend took me aside and I don't think he knows it, but he reminded me that I was doing this for me, and I could do it, no matter what anyone else said or thought. Brittany and Kenny, thank you.

I still haven't completed my story, but I somehow managed to overcome the time and space continuum in the last 48 hours of Nanowrimo and finished the month with 52,000 words. Those last two days I cranked out around 36,000 words of nonsense (with a lot of cheering from a great group of women) to cross the finish line. I can neither confirm nor deny whether dirty plot tricks were used or not. My fourth Nano success!

I actually opened up yWriter this morning and flipped through a couple of the later chapters. No, they're by no means perfect, but I wrote them. And that, my friends, is a great feeling.

I don't know what I have planned for this blog. Perhaps as I work towards a final product I'll continue to update on the progress. My friends in my writer's groups do blog tours, book reviews, guest authors. Maybe I'll jump on that bandwagon.