NaNoWriMo Winner: I’m done!

I’m done! It’s November 30th, and I am officially finished my first draft of Out of the Depths. It has been quite the month, with a rollercoaster of emotions as I tried to figure out what this book was about and where it was heading. Some days I got discouraged and never wrote. Some days I gritted my teeth, plowed through the opposition, and kept writing. Other days were glorious, where I dreamed of whole scenes and woke up and wrote them. Characters just popped onto the page fully developed, with distinct voices and characteristics. They said and did things I didn’t expect and took the story down twisted paths that eventually ended up where they needed to be. It was amazing!

Oh, I know this is just the beginning. Now the hard work begins of checking back to my outline (thanks to Johnny Worthen I actually made one), rewriting, rewriting, and more rewriting. But still the accomplishment stands. I’ve written a novel. Yeah!

Here’s an example of one of my favorite characters:

The dragon stood there with a confused look on its face. “Dear me. Oh dear me. What have I done?”
He looked at Westley with an expression of chagrin. “My good knight, may I congratulate you. Somehow you have broken the spell that was laid on me. I thank you from the bottom of my heart. Thank you, thank you.”
The dragon spoke with a cultured, British voice in a fine tenor, which was surprising considering its size.
Westley felt dazed. “Uh… I don’t think you should go around thanking people here. It gives them power over you.”
“Oh, that only applies to the Fey, and I can see that you are no Fey, although you do smell of Selkie and spider.” He sniffed delicately. “And something else I haven’t smelled for a long time. Hmmm.”
Westley stayed where he was, frozen against the boulder. At any moment the dragon would decide to eat him. Would it politely apologize before snatching him up and crunching on him like some appetizer?
The dragon seemed to be lost in thought. Then he looked at Westley again. “No matter. Please, Sir Knight, put that sword away. You have nothing to fear from me now. Allow me to introduce myself. Professor Martin Cho at your service, head librarian of the Boston Public Library. At least, I was before I was ensorcelled by the Dark Knight. It’s all a muddle. Would you mind awfully telling me the date?”
Boston? Library? Westley thought he was going to faint. He stammered. “Ah. When I left home it was June 20^th 2016.”
The dragon shook its head. “Ah, well, they most certainly have replaced me by now. I started working at the Boston library back when it opened in 1890, and I lost track of the time. Some sixty-fifty years later, I set out to research some arcane tidbit of information, and I was captured. Very foolish of me. I wasn’t paying attention at all. And perhaps I’d grown a little careless. After all, your world had become wrapped in iron and few of the Fey had any influence there. And since I’ve been here, well, to me it seems as if only a mere week has gone by, but then you can’t expect time to match here, can you?”

Out of the Depths is a YA Fantasy.