Well, November has come and gone, and I did not get my novel finished.

I’m sitting at about 37,000 words on the thing, which I feel is pretty damn good. It’s not 50,000, for sure, but I know what the rest of the book needs to cover. I’m pretty sure I can get it finished in the next couple of weeks.

So, what worked and what didn’t?

Well, writing in short burst worked pretty well for me. Most of my writing took place between classes and during lunch or right after school in five to ten minute chunks. I was usually able to get a few hundred words cranked out each time, which was awesome.

Something else that worked pretty well was doing a bit of plotting beforehand. Did I follow all that plotting? Hell no. But it got me thinking about my characters before I started writing them, and it helped steer the direction I took the story.

But what didn’t work? Well, writing at home, first of all. There are too many distractions there, and I found myself staring at the screen and writing nothing more often than not.

I also need to start keeping better track of character and place names. I spent an hour one day last month combing through old novels, short stories, and half-complete stories trying to find the name for a character, only to eventually decide I hadn’t named her. I could’ve spent that time actually writing if I had a document with my characters’ names and basic info listed.

All in all, I feel pretty good about my progress on Book 6. No, the first draft isn’t done, but that’s okay. It’s not like I was going to be ready to put it out before Christmas.

But hey, congrats to all those NaNo’ers who got their 50K written. It’s a helluva thing, ain’t it?