Hey everyone!
SOOOO….. I won NaNoWriMo??! Yes it’s official. On Tuesday November 25, I crossed the 50K mark. Aaaaand now it’s time for me to wobble wobble faint and wake up next year hahaha.
For those of you who have been following my progress over the past weeks, it hasn’t been easy. This was probably the most difficult NaNoWriMo I ever had to do, first and foremost because of long hours at work, and also because I am writing in a genre (YA fantasy) that I’m not accustomed to. Soooo it’s kind of miraculous that I did it. I am incredibly proud because I was able to prove to myself that I could do something as long as I put my mind to it.
ON THE OTHER HAND. I will think twice before I subject myself to the same torture again. (As in, I would love to do NaNoWriMo again in the future, buuuuuut next time if I anticipate the same sort of chaos at work, then I will either decide to not participate or just set a smaller word count target.)
Did I mention that I love the NaNoWriMo theme graphic for this year?!
What’s up next?
Finish the novel
Although I reached the NaNoWriMo word count goal of 50K, my novel is still only half-finished (because I project this to be a 100K story.) I plan to keep writing, albeit at a slower pace, throughout December and January. My goal is to finish the novel by the end of January 2020.
Beta-readers and revisions
First drafts are always rough, so I want to get this looked at by beta-readers and go through several rounds of revisions. I haven’t decided how extensively I want to revise before I send Fog out to beta-readers.
Revising previous novels
I have several novels stacked up in my “back drawer” (which is really somewhere on the cloud) that still haven’t been beta-read or revised (namely Shapeshifter and Never Forget.) I do want to eventually go back to them though I am not sure which I want to do first.
Read more
Looking back on my reading progress this year… it is pretty abysmal. Part of this is because I had a lot of commitments this year such as my wedding, but also I committed a lot of time to writing. They say that to be great writers, we also need to read a lot, so I really want to get back to reading. Tonight I’ve decided to cut short my writing time (now that I’ve fulfilled my word count goal) so that I will have time to curl up with a great book!
I dunno……. maybe query?
I know other writers who are querying and I watched some Youtube videos and read some articles on the topic and… querying is a whole other beast. I’m not sure if I’m up for it but maybe next year? I don’t know?
BUT FIRST, SLEEP
Because that is important.
About My NaNo Project, “Fog”
No one knows where the Fog comes from. All they know is that those who enter the Fog never return.
Luna and her twin sister Treya live in a town on the coast of Suni. Luna is the quiet one, while Treya is charismatic, powerful and the pride of the Delphinus Clan. Treya has already decided to be a Sorcerer and join the Queen’s Army, just like their mother and father. But Luna doesn’t know what she wants to be; also, joining the Queen’s Army seems like a lot of work.
On the day of their graduation. Luna rescues a boy from the edge of the Fog. His name is Caio Amadeus Vladimir and he looks nothing like anyone in the country. Caio wants to go into the Fog and map out the lost regions of Suni, and he asks Luna to be his bodyguard. Luna thinks he is delusional.
Until Treya disappears on a misty day. Luna will do anything to bring her back.
My NaNoWriMo Progress: 52093 words / 50000 words
A Snippet from “Fog”
It has been ten years since he had received the telegraph. In the beginning he had told stories to himself: perhaps his father was simply missing, and perhaps they had identified the wrong body. It was when they shipped home his father’s things- his notebooks, his maps, his clothing, his odd collection of gadgets- when it became an undeniable truth that his father would never come back. His mother was never the same ever since. Caio kept wishing that his dad was still alive. But the years passed, there were no letters from his father in the mailbox. And he stopped checking.
If Caio were a bit younger, if he were a bit more naive, if this happened at a time when he was still going to the front gates every morning to check his mailbox, maybe he would believe this illusion.
“I don’t think you’re my father,” Caio says. “He died a long time ago.”
Photo by Guillaume Briard on Unsplash
SOPHIE LI 
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