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Over at The Plot Whisperer , Martha Alderson has some hope if you completed National Novel Writing Month with 50,000 words… if you’ve created 50,000 words of mush.

There are a lot of reasons people don’t sign up for NaNoWriMo. One of them is because of all of the editing involved when you’re done. Editing while you write–and going back and forth is what takes the most time in writing a novel–is easier on the brain than doing all of the writing, and then all of the editing.

It looks like Martha Alderson has some good ideas, and any help is welcome. So, assuming you can stand looking at your manuscript any time soon, she might be able to help you whip it into shape.

I’ll be checking her blog out to see what I can learn. I just won’t be touching my manuscript for at least a week. I can barely type these words.

I have never written so much in one day, ever.

This morning, my husband started singing, “Gotta write like the wind”–his own version of “Gotta ride like the wind”–and he isn’t signed up for NaNo. That was for my benefit.

One line in my story was: “Keep going! she told herself.” So I did. Here was today’s breakdown. I want a record of it somewhere to prove I wrote this much.

9:30am: 40,460
10am: 40,794 (334 words)
11am: 41,516 (722 words)
Noon: 42,381 (865 words)
1pm: 43,264 (883 words)
2pm: 44,278 (1,014 words)
3pm: 45,066 (788 words)
4pm: 46,028 (962 words)
5pm: 47,040 (1,012 words)
6pm: Same.
7pm: 48,196 (1,156 words)
8pm: 49,997 (1,801 words)

I typed the last word of my novella/short novel and found I had 49,997 words.

I showed my husband. He reached out and typed, “The very end.” That brought me to 50,000.

I did it!

The word count verifier at NaNoWriMo told me I had a different word count than Microsoft Word 2007 said I had. I added about 100 words and worked it out in the end.

Final count: 50,028 words… and the first draft of my novel is finished.

Yesterday, I had some good things to say about “Twilight” in that it didn’t have the heroine automatically having sex with her boyfriend.

But I’m not yet ready to go on a Stephanie Meyer love fest for one reason:

SPOILER ALERT

The fourth book in the series, Breaking Dawn.

Bella and Edward get married, Bella becomes pregnant, and she has a psychic bond with her baby. And then Jacob imprints on the baby (!?). And then Bella becomes a vampire and loses her humanity.

I’m not alone in my feelings. If you want to see some bottled vitriol, go over to Amazon and read some of the reviews. First three books: great. Fourth book? { shudder } That’s a quote.

So, we know that the series devolves into a glorification of teenaged motherhood with a perfect baby, and an adult werewolf who falls head-over-heels in love with the baby. Uh, no… and eww, gross.

Dear God. I thought the only people who pushed the idea of teenaged marriage and pregnancy as being perfectly wonderful, and grown men claiming women as babies, lived in countries where women don’t have any rights at all. Why is this in our bookstores as entertainment?

In the book (and the film), Twilight, a seventeen-year-old girl falls in love with a very, very handsome 107-year-old man. Yes, he’s a vampire, but he’s still been alive for about 107 years.

The complaint I’ve read over and over in reviews about the book (and the film) is that it’s too “sweet”. That could have two meanings, and reading further through the reviews, I have found both complaints.

1. The reviewer is complaining that the story centers too much on the romantic aspects of gazing into each other’s eyes, holding hands, talking for hours, and the sexual tension that comes at the very beginning of a relationship before anything physically intimate has occurred.

That criticism I could understand. This is a matter of personal preference in storytelling. I will never forget walking out of the movie and seeing a father who was forced to go went with two teenaged girls. The girls were smiling and talking a mile-a-minute. The father looked seriously pained. Fine. Funny, and fine.

2. Then, there is the other kind of review where the reviewer is criticizing the story because Bella and Edward do not have sex in the first novel. They’re in love, therefore, it is “unrealistic that they wouldn’t have sex”.

Garbage. As a society, if we have reached a point at which a 17-year-old is required to have sex when she is in a relationship, then we are in serious trouble and there are a lot of people who need to get their minds out of the gutter–and this is coming from an erotic romance writer.

Unless the word “erotic” is printed on the cover or the spine of a story, sex is not compulsory in a story.  And the day when sex is required of a 17-year-old girl will be the day our culture has failed.