NaNoWriMo Winner!

To follow up on my creativity post below, I finally decided to participate in NaNoWriMo this year. I signed up on October 30, and started plot outlining and character development sketches that night. I started writing for real on November 1, and haven't stopped. I love it. I have had such a good time writing and watching the story unfold as I type. I love writing dialogue, even though I'm not entirely sure that I'm punctuating it correctly, I need to work on that, but December is for such editing and cleaning up.



If you'll recall, the goal and challenge of NaNo is to write 50,000 words in 30 days. I heard that was about 175 pages, or about 6 pages/day. Yeah, I hit 50,000 words on Monday, November 17, just over halfway through the month, and that was around 100 pages. I write in Times, 12 point font, 1.5 spaced, 1 inch margins all around. Go me, I'm a winner! So having achieved that goal, there is still this little issue of the book not being done. At all. There's a lot left to write, I think. So, my new goal is to finish the book by November 30. Not the editing and cleaning up, like I said, that's for December, but just to get the story told. I did manage to get the whole thing nicely outlined and I have an ending, so I know where it's going, which is good. It's reassuring, really, to be writing toward something now, instead of just writing with a vague idea of what's coming.



So what am I writing, you ask? Where did the plot inspiration finally come from? I'm writing chick lit, which is something I never in a million years imagined writing, but it is pretty easy to write that kind of story, I guess because it's just a story, and I'm not really going for some deeper meaning, or anything like that. A good place to start for my first book, I think. So the story is about a young woman, in her late 20s, from the east coast but living in Vegas and working back and forth between Vegas and LA. She's a workaholic, doing event planning for celebrities and really high-end parties, except she hates celebrities and all the publicity crap that comes with them. She thinks they're all full of themselves and have too much money for their own good. She's had a lot of trouble keeping relationships because of her work schedule and the priority that she puts on her career. This is all fine and good until she finds that one casual friendship/relationship has evolved into something serious at the same time as he meets a famous actor who is different from the rest of them, and winds up dating him too. Now she's forced to chose between these two seemingly perfect relationships, with her dream job looming in the background. It's definitely kind of cheesy, and a complete girly book, but it's been really fun to write. There's really no source of inspiration for it, it started from the idea of a girl meeting and then dating her celebrity crush, and sort of evolved from there. The main male character, the actor, is loosely based on my celebrity crush, and that's about all the inspiration I have. Who is it? Not telling.