First off, my NaNo word count total is greater than 50474. It’s closer to 51272. Would you believe that I forgot to count a whole day’s production in my final tally? Anyhow, NaNo won’t let me update my word count, now that I’ve won, so I’m just making that note here.

Secondly, I gave my opus a cursory read-through (all 110, single-spaced, 12-point pages of it) this morning. So far the characters seem consistent, engaging and well differentiated, each with distinctive voices (very important when most of the story is just them talking). The overall setting (Boston area) comes through clearly, although I need to work on the setting of specific scenes. (I tend to get caught up in the dialog to the neglect of the setting.) The tone, for the most part, is consistent; though the story starts out light and comic, then moves toward a more thoughtful middle, Sarah’s melodramatic, sarcastic, slightly pedantic and wry voice remains the same throughout, which gives the tone some continuity. Despite its small focus on two or three people, it feels like a busy active novel, not overstuffed, but realistically populated with primary, secondary and tertiary players. (All that work on the backstories of bit players in Sarah’s life pays off, I guess!)

In summary, I’m proud of myself for having reached the NaNo goal. I’m also proud of myself for producing a substantive, compelling part of a story that I still like and want to write, even though I’ve been eating, breathing and sleeping it for the past three and a half weeks. In other words, NaNo helped me gain a lot of ground on a promising project, one that I think could actually go somewhere [maybe to a publishing house].