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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.

After a few moments, he pushed the door open and stepped out.

Ava straightened to her full height and strained her neck to try and see out through the narrow gap Caleb had left. Her eyes were at carpet level of the floor above. She leaned forward on the staircase, straining to hear where Caleb was.

Footsteps approached the door and Ava scrambled back down the stairs.

“Ava,” Caleb whispered above her.

Ava stopped and saw his silhouette

Ava stopped and turned back, a part of her cowering

Ava stopped and turned back. She climbed the stairs, again, but more reluctantly this time. The sudden sound of the footsteps closing in on her, and plus the darkness of his silhouette above her made her realize just how vulnerable she was to attack.

She waited to hear Caleb tell her that the nosferatu were coming, for her to swipe her tag on the scanner, to get back into the server room as quickly as she could, to run.

“C’mon,” he urged. “Hurry. It’s clear.”

Her heart still pounded as if he’d said warned her of an impending attack. She forced her feet forward until she was at the top of the staircase stairs.

Caleb said, “I’ll keep watch. You only have a minute. You only have a minute.”

She was too afraid to reply. She couldn’t bring herself to make any noise. She had seen what felt safe enough in the server room to be cocky over the radio when she’d had to, but outside of the dubious safety of those walls, the memory of what those things could do to a person was clear in her mind.

There was a sound on the street….

Total immersion erotic romance writing. What a concept.

Have you ever kind of tried to hide something from yourself? I mean, you obviously know that there might be a plan in the works, but you just kind of tell yourself that it probably won’t happen so there’s no reason to stress?

That’s what I was doing yesterday. I was telling myself, “Who? Me? I know I need to write more, but I have a lot to do, and writing so much in one day probably isn’t even possible for me, again.”

My exhausted brain didn’t even want to think about being in front of the computer, and with only a week left–seven days!–and 16,900 more words to write… Yikes!

So I got myself in front of the computer before my sleep-deprived inner editor had even thought about coffee. And here was today’s progress. At these times, this was my total word count for NaNoWriMo:

Start: 9 a.m. - 33,100 total words.
10 a.m.: 33,601 total words. (up 501)
11 a.m.: 34,123 total words. (up 522)
12 p.m.: 35,047 total words. (up 924)
1 p.m.: 35,742 total words. (up 695)

Break until 2 p.m.
3 p.m.:  36,243 total words. (up 501)
4 p.m.:  36,373 total words. (up 130)
5 p.m.:  36,908 total words. (up 535)
6 p.m.:  37,045 total words. (up 72)

Break until 8 p.m.
9 p.m.:  37,210 total words. (up 165)
10 p.m.: 37,531 total words. (up 321)
11 p.m.: 38,130 total words. (up 664)

Total words written today: 5,030.

I am pleased with how the book is turning out. I spent part of today writing a sexy scene that I think readers will find hasn’t been done to death, elsewhere. At least, I certainly hope so!

Again, I’d like to thank Simon Haynes for his genius idea.

But there’s more than one reason I’m counting the days until NaNoWriMo ends: I don’t think I can do many more days like this without needing a new brain, no matter how well I think the story is going.

I don’t know what I’d do without a writing group. Oh, yes I do. Imagine yesterday’s post all the time.

I went to my writing group this evening, and now I’m re-energized because they said they got very involved in the chase scene–and those were the pages I wrote on November 1st, the first day of NaNoWriMo.

However, the one thing I’m never going to bring to the group are the “naughty” parts of the story. I don’t think the management of the bookstore where we meet would thank me. But what I’m writing is an erotic romance novella. Take out all the naughty parts, and while there is still a lot of story there, big chunks are missing.

So I went to the publisher’s site where I want to submit the story when I’m finished, and I looked carefully at the kinds of stories that came out recently. It took me about a nanosecond to realize I need to make certain I keep my focus on the romance and the intimate parts of my story (pun intended), and not let myself be too distracted by the other side of the cross-genre story I’m writing.

But the key is this: I just may be on the right track! Cue the lifting of the clouds, the trumpets, and the angels… or in this genre, would that be the naughty devils?