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Three-Day Novel: The End

The Three-Day Novel weekend is over. This weekend was an interesting one. I set a goal for 50,000 words, thinking I could spread that out over the three days. This worked out really well last year, so why would this year be any different?

Well, this year I moved the week before Labor Day weekend. I started writing a plot that hit really close to home and wound up writing only 8500 words total in the first two days. Spending quite a bit of time with a close friend who was in town for the weekend for a different reason also contributed to the lack of writing over the first two days. That’s a good reason not to write, though.

Whatever the case, I still had almost 42,000 words left to write today in order to finish 50k this weekend. Technically this was doable, though I had to account for the inevitable slowing down that would happen at some point during the day.

And slow down I did. It was mostly the fault of a tornado warning in my area around 4:30. I would have had no idea if a friend hadn’t IMed me and told me. Since I live in a second-floor apartment, these things are good to know. Luckily all the action I got was a little bit of rain, but the time that went into watching the tornado warning and making sure it wasn’t serious ate into my writing time enough that I had to write 4k an hour every hour to make up for it.

That, my writing speed dictated, wasn’t going to happen. I was already losing steam with my typing accuracy and speed later, and there was a pretty good chance I wouldn’t reach 50k by midnight. That was okay, though, because something amazing happened. I finished the book around 9:30pm.

The original end was at 39,500 words, over 10,000 words short of my goal, but who cares? I finished the thing and couldn’t think of anything else to put in it. A bit of quick math revealed that I had written 30994 words today, so I added four more words for exactly 31,000 words and a new single-day personal record.

So that was this year’s Three-Day novel. Let’s hope my junior effort is less eventful on the negative end. One of these years I’ll attempted Three-Day and Dragon*Con since I now live a stone’s throw from the con. Don’t worry, folks–my Three-Day goal will be significantly lower if I go to Dragon*Con. Maybe I’ll do that next year. Maybe.

The end lesson is that I don’t have too many excuses besides an otherwise packed day to do a 50k day one, now do I? Well, except maybe my wrists…

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