I am so very, very done.

I finished NaNoWriMo 2005 with a ravishing total of 50,633 words. Of those, 24,725 were tossed together in the final week.

Key lessons learned:

• I accomplish more writing outside of my home than inside it.
• It is much, much better to make a little progress every day than to hope to catch up on weekends. So much other stuff happens on weekends. There’s no time to write.
• Butler County is lucky to be home to many interesting and friendly writers. There will be several books coming out of this area, if I’m not mistaken.
• Throwing in an arbitrary plot element, such as a chocolate gun, creates interesting problems and twists. I will be taking outsider suggestions more often in the future.
• Taking a book plan seriously makes it hard to write the book. Taking a deadline seriously makes it easy to get words on paper. It’s easy to confuse the two kinds of seriousness, and important to keep remembering their difference.

Incidentally, if you’d like to know to what depths my writing dropped in the quest to complete this project, here is the final paragraph of the manuscript:

Not moving his gun from my throat, he reached over and caught my chocolate covered fist. He raised it to his mouth, stuck out his tongue, closed his eyes, and licked.

I’m currently at 42,567 NaNoWriMo words, after a 5K word blast yesterday and another 1K jolt this morning. I plan two short sessions today with the aim of reaching 4.5K words today, leaving just 4K for the final day.

As for the actual content of the novel: You know how some writers repeatedly explore the same general themes in their work, and how these themes may map to their personal obsessions? Apparently I am obsessed with people hiding in basements and crawl spaces of the homes of their loved ones. I had no idea that this was an obsession of mine — I don’t think about it on a daily or weekly or even monthly basis, or in fact ever — but once again in this novel someone is hiding in a basement storage area. And stealing food from other people’s refrigerators. I swear I have never done these things myself and I don’t know how they keep reappearing in my plots. But there you go.

Also, there is now another dead body, this one apparently killed somewhere and then brought in secret and placed in the narrator’s apartment, while the narrator was not there. Combine this with the chocolate revolver and we see that this book is turning out less like a Raymond Chandler novel and more like Murder By Death.

Incidentally, new working title as proposed by Some Friends over the weekend: The Girl With the Chocolate Gun.

Still to come: The revelation of what the book is about, the big confrontation scene, the protagonist’s facing of fears and overcoming the big obstacle. It’s all still a mystery to me, so it’s exciting to know it has to all come to light soon.

I am now at 34,143 NaNoWriMo words. My narrator is evincing a sassier attitude now. And coincidentally, “Bitch” by the Rolling Stones has now been randomly chosen by the iPod. How perfect.

Also important today: I brought the chocolate gun into the plot. I am not sure how it will be used. I did realize that it would make a perfect fake suicide item. Also, the fact that hot hands melt chocolate occurs to me. So many possibilities.

Non-writing news: Today being the day after Thanksgiving, I also repeated two of my annual traditions: (1) avoiding all shopping locales and (2) putting holiday music into rotation. It wasn’t too hard to avoid the shopping, as I had lots of work to do and little money to spend. And it was a delight to dig out the holiday CDs and shift around iTunes playlists. How much cheerier everything feels when a “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” comes on the stereo!

I have, to this point, created 30908 words of fiction in the month of November.

And it’s all deathless prose.

Yes, every word is deathless, in the sense of being zombie-like, undead, breathing with a particular non-life that makes the internal editor in me weep, bitterly.

But then again, having pushed through to the second half of the NaNoWriMo adventure, I can attest to the value of having set goals that appear impossible but are attainable. My book looked excellent at the start, and its excellence daunted me, so I wrote little. The little that I wrote was not good, and then the writing became bad. And then truly bad. I mean, vomit-inducing ickiness. Real trash. I cringe even now at the thought. I will never be able to read entire pages of this crap.

I kept going because of the deadline, and because I’d been so public about having signed on for this challenge. I could not permit myself to back down. Also, I didn’t want to back down. I wanted to push through.

So, I had to come up with words. To come up with words, I had to make up stuff to write about. Pull things from air, from between couch cushions, from the space behind my fridge.

Now, to my surprise and delight, the words are starting to form into ideas that are not quite bad. Some are intriguing. Others are good. Stuff that had been floating around in my head, things I’d wanted to write about that I had not planned to include in this novel, are now finding a home. And not just any old home, but one that really works for them and works for the book. It’s a funny synthesis, borne I guess of pressure and deadlines and desperation.

At 30-some thousand words I’m still behind schedule overall, but the holiday weekend continues and there’s time to catch up. More importantly, I’m on the trail of something that could be sweet.

Oh, and the chocolate gun? (Please see the comments of my past NaNoWriMo posts if you don’t know about the chocolate gun.) I tried to introduce it today but got side-tracked again. However, my latest insight/angle on the main character opens opportunities for the chocolate gun, in a big way. I’m going to bring it in tomorrow for sure, if for no other reason than to at last have it in the book, ready to go off in the third act.

NaNoWriMo update: I’ve reached the halfway mark for my word count. I’m going to need to average 3,125 words per day for the remaining 8 days of the event to reach my goal. Fortunately, this is not impossible, as that’s roughly the word count I posted today and yesterday. And with Thanksgiving Thursday, I have a little extra time to churn out more text.

The plot is not completely lost, but it’s deeply confused and stagnant. I have at least managed to get the main character out from her apartment a few times, but oddly enough the other most common locale for the book is an interrogation room at the police station. I have never been in an interrogation room, so I’ve had to concoct it from what I’ve seen on TV cop shows and movies. It bears a mroe than passing resemblance to the questioning rooms of “L.A. Confidential” and “Homicide: Life on the Street” in particular.

The chick lit plot line appeared for a while, then faded for a few days. I will try to bring it back tomorrow. A gun finally made an appearance today, and for that I was grateful. Maybe tomorrow I’ll work in Christina’s recommendation for a chocolate gun. Mmmm!

Tonight I ventured down to populous Cranberry Township to write with fellow NaNoWriMo-ers. The Panera here is crazy busy — the meeting room was double-booked, people milled around looking for open tables — and all the same this has been my most productive writing day all month. 3,211 words in under three hours.

You’d expect the laptop to be melting from the heat of my writing speed, but it’s holding up well — perhaps because this place is freaking freezing.

I’ve largely dropped the chick lit elements of my previous plan, focusing right now on simply following the basic mystery plot. I’m a little annoyed at how it keeps drifting toward a police procedural. But the detectives on the case are sort of amusing, and the heroine really is in a pickle. Also, organized crime has surfaced. It’s a simplistic collection of all the most common cliches, and yet I’m still enjoying it. I have not idea how it’s going to resolve, but I’ve over half a book yet to figure that out.