I haven't really been on FA much at all during November, which was during NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). My goal for the month was to write at least 50,000 words towards a novel -- anything goes, too, so it could be a fanfic, porn, whatever, haha.

Originally, I was going to write a story about some psychic cats in sort of a modern setting. It'd be an original story and would be clean. At about 10,000 words into it and ten days through the month, I decided that it just wasn't fun to write anymore, it wasn't what I wanted to write, and it wasn't really all that interesting. Some could see it as 'giving up,' but I saw it as an important decision I had to make in order to complete NaNoWriMo and enjoy doing it, too.

On the 11th of November, I think I made the decision official and started writing a new story. It was actually the story I had tentatively titled "Best Friends," though I started it purely from scratch and only kept the general idea. I was very excited about the story and the more I thought on it, the more I realized that I could do the 50,000 words in just 20 days, though it'd be hard because it'd mean writing about 2500 words a day instead of the originally projected 1670.

However, I set a personal goal to write 3000 words each day, though not being disappointed if I wrote at least 2000. Due to my ironclad determination and general excitement over the cuteness and depth to the story, finally seeing everything come together and able to present itself in a way far different from any of the stories I'd ever written -- which I love doing, by the way, challenging myself to use a different style -- I managed to meet this goal and wrote over 2000 ever single day except for Thanksgiving (one other day on my progress report says it was 916, but it was actually 3000... I had to stay up til 1 am to finish, but I did it).

For all of those interested in how Zeph writes and want to see the word count, you can see it right here on my NaNoWriMo Progress Report. :3

So I ended up writing over 63,000 words in the month of November, due to that first story's dead words, and I challenged myself by writing 52,749 words in just 20 days, making it the fastest story of such length I've ever written. Her Biggest Fan, which was about 49,000 words, was written in just a little more than 3 weeks. Also, by comparison, both A Friend Indeed and Her Biggest Fan fall below the 50,000 word mark, so this is an even bigger story than either of them.

Unfortunately it's not complete just yet. I've taken a week or two off of writing it, since NaNoWriMo took a lot out of me and some other incredibly awesome occurrences have been happening which I'd rather spend my time with (tsk tsk, hi :3), but I'll get to finishing it before the end of the year. It'll probably be between 70,000 and 80,000 words when finished, because I have all of the story figured out already in my head and it's just a matter of writing it, really.

Oh yeah, and I should probably get back to work on Middle of Nowhere sometime, too. Part of me feels a little bad because I didn't finish it as per my hope to finish it by the end of 2008, but that was only the second story I've ever written and I've found a great amount of satisfaction writing stories like A Friend Indeed, Her Biggest Fan, Fleeting Friendship (that new one), and so on just because I don't like the same old quite as much as I like challenging myself to something new and original. Diversity in my writing and stories may mean some people might not enjoy every story of mine, but hopefully they'll find a character or personality in one of them that clicks and makes the whole thing just feel so right, hehe. But yeah, I'll try and get another chapter written sometime after I figure out what the heck to do. Thankfully, if I set a goal of 3000 words or so, it'll only take 4 days to write (actually that's a lie, since I already have about 4400 words written).

Hope you all had an awesome Thanksgiving and are getting excited about the Holiday season (Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Shishkabooble Day, etc.) and, of course, the new year. 2009 for the win! I just nuked the 400+ messages I had over the month, so sorry if I didn't comment or whatever. ^^;