"It's hysteria. Relief after a near-death experience."

        NaNo's over, peeps. After a whirlwind month of exams and presentations and goatlings and hey! writing, I have more than 25,000 words in my notebook. 25,051, to be exact. Boy, am I glad I only did half NaNo!

        It was tiring. It was stressful. It was cramping hands and loads of pencils and tea. It was amazing. I love my book. My characters are awesome - I know them so well it feels like we're best friends. That never really happened before with any other story I wrote, but even before I started writing, I took a lot of my spare time to write stuff down in my everything notebook about them, and how they talked, and all sorts of other rambling nonsense. And it worked! At least, I think it worked - I guess I'll have to wait and see.
        By no means is my book done. I'm probably not even halfway through the first draft. But it's a start, and now I have only to develop a plan to KEEP WRITING. My continual struggle. Once NaNo's over, I just kind of... Blah.
         So even though I can't share the plot with y'all yet, I'm going to put some pictures on here that I've collected on a secret board on Pinterest.
         This is my main character, Marian, only she's not so skinny as this actress. Isn't it hard to find pictures for characters that aren't perfect looking?!

        This is her best friend. She's quite mischievous.

        Little brothers...

        And sisters...

        And now for some pictures that I'm not going to describe because of Reasons.

        Any ideas? I didn't put any of the giveaway pictures on here so probably not *evil laugh*. I'm sad that NaNo's over, and I'm relieved as well. I'm really glad it did it this year, though, because next year I'll be taking college classes full time and probably won't have this much spare time to write. Maybe I'll just have to do it on the computer, then. Any NaNo experiences from y'all?
        Last, but not least, I want to give a HUGE thank you to the friend who convinced me to do NaNo this year. You made this month an awesome one. And congratulations on winning too!

Blessings,

Reyna

P.S. The post title is my favorite quote from an adventure novel my cousin wrote two years ago for school.

NaNo?

        I think I mentioned in a post a veeerry long time ago (perhaps early this year?) that I was thinking about doing NaNoWriMo in November. For those of you that don't know, that's National Novel Writing Month. Where a bunch of crazy people devote a whole month of their lives to pumping out thousands of words a day, and by the time December comes around, they have a novel length draft. Sure, it needs a ton of editing, but the whole point is to get writers writing. So a while ago, I thought 'Hey! That sounds about right for me!' And I resolved to do it once November came around. But when it did, I looked at my schedule and realized I just didn't have the time. Sad, I know. I was really looking forward to getting started on my new book, too. And I found out that my dear friend Aspen and her little sister were doing it as well, and that made me wish even more that I was doing it. But November was looking to be a very busy month for me, what with a bunch of school projects and exams, and goat babies, so I gave up the idea entirely. 

        But then! A friend at church asked me if I was doing NaNo because he was looking for a writing buddy, and I had to tell him no. But then he said that if you sign up with the Young Writers Program you can switch your goal word count to whatever you want, so instead of 50,000 words at the end of the month you can shoot for something else. He was doing 25,000. So that got me thinking again. Since I knew someone here who was doing it, that would make it a little bit better. So ten days late, I started writing. I already had almost 5000 words, but I was 4000 behind. I decided to set my goal at 25,000 - I didn't think I'd be able to manage more than that. I'm doing NaNo, peeps! So I've been turning out 1000 words per day trying to make it up to the daily average line. It's slow going, but I'm getting there. 1000 words might not sound like a whole lot, but I'm writing by hand, so it takes longer to write, and then I have to count. 

        See, I'm catching up! So although I have a half dozen posts sitting in drafts waiting to be finished, my other writing is taking priority right now. Sorry. Anyway, it's been so fun writing this story! I can't tell y'all what it's about yet, but can I just say that I love it? Of course I do! But in reality, it's the first thing I've written where I feel like I really know my characters. To tell the truth, the characters in my previous stories were, well, dry. But these people, they're amazing. They're my friends and I love them. :) Are any of you doing NaNo? If so, how's it going?

Blessings,

Reyna