The madness. It is over. Day -1.

Huh. Ended up with a shade over 140,000 words this year. Pretty interesting all around: did a lot of write-ins with the local chapter, had two weeks of the month off work and had a lot of fun in the process. A breakdown ...

Curdled Magics: The magician series novel draft went well. It ended up at a shade over 50K when I had figured on, oh, 90K. I cut some parts out as 'not necessary' that were in retrospect necessary yo write. The second draft needs some fixing (the first 6,500 words are in past tense rather than present, for example) and there will be a lot to change, fix and improve in another draft but the framework of the story turned out to be rather solid. I do need to give it more room to breathe, but I can work on that as well.

Ghosting: A novella set after the novel from Charlie's POV. I wrote it for myself alone, so that I'll know how she met Dyer and what CASPER is and the like. Pure backstory. In the middle of a story, but even so.

Rogue Dreams: I don't generally do sci-fi, which is one reason I wrote it for my second nano. I try to do at least one genre or story I never do every year as a kind of crazy challenge. This story almost ate my brain a couple of times given the first 7,500 words were a mess and the story that followed on a new attempt bore no relation to the story I'd wanted to tell. On the plus side, that does mean that I can still tell that story at some future date. It also never lived up to the promise of the first scene, but trying sci-fi without any real worldbuilding or notes at all is a recipe for disaster anyway. A fun disaster, but still that. I will probably re-read it in a few months but likely do nothing else with it.

War & Pieces: A mainstream-attempt at a novel/satire of nanowrimo and thrillers. It started getting far more serious than it should and I borrowed a plot threat from a story I wrote 2 years ago that probably didn't work at all. It is a neat story but probably could never get published for reasons of, well, liability. I will go back to it in a bit, but I'll need to alter a lot of the character and, probably, make his family far less important to the story. I also need to figure out what kind of story it's going to be at all. It was a fun start to a story and should be great fun to tweak later.

All told, this year counts as a success as far as nanowrimo goes. I had to cancel nothing to do it, which is definitely a plus, and am left in that state of: 'Wake up! Wait. No need to write. Sleep?' mental place which is fun. I have in the past generally done one serious draft (sometimes a redo of a nano) from Dec.-Feb. but am mostly taking December off save from short stories. Will begin the edits/revisions on Ghoulish Happenings in January and then the re-do on the sequel to it after that. At which point I will probably begin edits/revisions on Curdled Magics. But we shall see how it all plays out.