I started on November 7th and I finished on November 23rd. 16 days of writing to get the first draft of Case of the Morning Zombies finished. It comes out to an average of 3,444 words per day. When you take into account just the 26 hours I spent writing, I averaged 2,120 words per hour or 35.3 words per minute. But, I finished.

It isn't the same as my normal writing. My normal time to write a novel is three months (92 days with a standard deviation of 3 actually) but the draft comes out much smoother. That is me going back, rewriting a chapter and going into the next. Then editing the prior chapter and working on the next, overlapping my writing almost constantly to come up with a well-crafted first draft. Morning Zombies is not polished. It has all the important parts of a novel, a story, a plot, hopefully interesting characters, and not nearly enough descriptions. It isn't read for the Wizards call for submissions by a long shot, but I still think it is a viable story. It just means that December will have some interesting editing rounds as I try to clean up the story, fix the plot holes, and flesh out some of the sections that I rushed through.

I'm glad I did it. I'm glad I could sit down and come up with a novel in almost half a month. It is an accomplishment I didn't think I could really do. Will I do it next year? Probably not. But, you never know. A lot can happen in a year.

My mother said an interesting thing today. She mentioned that I have a gift, the gift of creating stories. But, I'm focusing on specific accomplishments, like speed-writing a novel or trying to get published. But, it all comes down to I create stories. I create stories that make people cry and think, I make them feel good and loved or even see the world in a different way. As one friend said, I can make even the disgusting interesting. I'm sure she's bias, but maybe I needed to be reminded that I'm a writer. Pure and simple. It doesn't matter that I keep track of how many hours I write or how many words per hour I do. Tricks like NaNoWriMo won't really change the fact I love to write and I will succeed, its just a matter of time and effort. But, just like NaNoWriMo and just like Shane (the zombie in my novel), I won't give up.

Hey, thanks for reading and for the encouragements.

Case of the Morning Zombies (NaNoWriMo, 55,108 of 50,000 words)
Case of the Morning Zombies (37 of 37 chapters)