Well, there it is. My big, fat NaNoWriMo Winner button!
I clocked in around 5:30 PM on November 30th with a total word count of 50,687. The book is titled Eva and is about...well, it's kinda hard to explain what it's about because there are really two separate stories going on at the same time and I haven't formulated a synopsis.
The inspiration for Eva was a missing persons case that made the news back when I lived in the U.P. in the 80's (Upper Peninsula of Michigan, in case you're unfamiliar with The U.P.). My intent was to write a mystery/suspense fictional piece based on that case, but a few thousand words into it, the thing morphed to encompass Native American spiritualism and magical realism. In the end, it bears no resemblance at all to the story that inspired it.
I joked that my book shares certain qualities with all great literature: it has a beginning, middle and an end. That's pretty much where the similarities stop.
50,000+ words in a month did not yield, for me, great - nay, even good, writing. What it did yield was the bones of a novel, or two. I've also fallen back in love with the process of writing. I'm more in tune with the world around me. Heck, I've even started carrying around my spiral bound pack of index cards so I can jot down ideas, sights, smells and dialogue stolen through eavesdropping.
This manuscript will be put to rest for a while. I have a bit of research to do to add flesh to some areas, and there are other pieces that will be carved out completely. In the meantime, I'm starting on my next novel, which is a YA Fantasy book I've been contemplating for some time.
Who knows, though? Give these characters an inch and they'll take a mile. Pretty soon, you might not know where you're headed.