NaNoWriMo Update 4 - The Price of Winning

WARNING! THIS POST HAS A SLIGHTLY GRAPHIC PHOTO OF INJURY!

So, NaNoWriMo is over for another year, this is my first attempt at doing it officially... so how did it go?

As I mentioned on the last post, I was on track. A little behind, but it had been a weird month in the day job requiring some exhausting extra hours. I guess it's to be expected working in retail at this time of the year. But I was recovering, the word count was slowly getting back on track, and I was just back on par at the beginning of this week when I fell ill.

And when I mean "FALL" I mean it in every sense of the word.

Not entirely sure what it was, it felt like some evil stomach bug, but it really knocked me out, quite literally. I had a moment when I collapsed on the kitchen floor from just being dizzy and breaking out in a cold sweat, but I thought that the worst was over after that. Luckily I was off work that day, so I just went to bed to recover...

The head injury from blacking out
starts scabbing up. Lovely...

My lovely wife came home, and while she was downstairs getting her food, I got up to use the bathroom and that's the last thing I remember. Next thing, the lovely wife is investigating the bang, and I come-to wondering why the floor is next to my face.

Two days of basically sleeping 18+ hours a day, trying to get my strength back was helped by not only Debs keeping an eye on me and keeping me well supplied with juice, fruit, and anything I could need, but also by the awesome staff I have in my relatively new shop who really showed their worth by covering for the days I couldn't make it in. Thanks ladies! You're all awesome.

I tweeted while I was ill, saying that I really couldn't manage the writing, and I had resigned myself to failing. It was a shame, I was about 8000 words short of hitting the 50K, but I felt crap.

But, saying that, I felt better by Wednesday afternoon, and while Debs was at her Mage: The Awakening game, I pondered trying to write and see if I could at least whittle away at those words. Strangely, the story I wanted to tell came to a logical conclusion by the end of Wednesday night. I could have typed "The End" and that would have been it, but the only problem was, I was still 3500 words short.

Seems I won! What did I win?
Do I get a prize?

Thursday was easier too. I returned to work, and miracle of miracles, I was inspired. The book breaks into three sections, and I'd named each section after the sleep-stage/brain waves. I had the idea to switch characters and have little journal asides in between each section to show the struggles that the lead character's father is going through, creating the dreamshare technology to try to reach his sleeping/comatose daughter. It resulted in some cool new stuff that I think builds on the story nicely, and I must admit some of it did make me fill-up while writing it.

The whole story has a lot of personal elements, in face the whole of the WILD RPG is quite a personal one to me, so I really hope that I can get it finished and do it justice. It's my key goal for the new year. I will finish the game, it'll be designed in a cool and interesting new way, the layout will be awesome, the illustrations will be revolutionary... Or I'll certainly do my hardest to try.

Having a tie-in novel to go with it is a great start. If it doesn't get published as a separate entity, it'll be fantastic background for the core rulebook.

Anyway, the extra sections tipped me over the 50,000 words, and by the end of Thursday, the NaNoWriMo site had verified that I'd officially "won".

And now? A rest. Just a little one, after all, I work in retail, and Xmas shopping has already started. So I guess, they say there's no rest for the wicked - I must have been pretty horrible in a previous life.

Until next time, stay multi-classy.