PerNoFiMo is FINISHED!

Last night I officially completed the first draft of my W.I.P. Time to blow the horns! WHOOOO!!! Personal Novel Finishing Month has been a success.

So, for anyone who's curious (and me to record):

Working Title: Forget Me Not
Genre: YA Fantasy
Idea came: March 4, 2011
Bumps along the way: I started to write it seriously around April, but had to scrap it mid-June and start over.
Finish date: November 30, 2011.
Word count: 67,000
Brought to you by: Josh Groban, Josh Groban, and oh yeah, Josh Groban. I couldn't listen to anything but him for some reason. Especially this song:

For those curious about the premise of it, let's just say that when I heard this song I was kind of freaked out about how well it fit my MC's situation:

(As you might tell, music is huge for me when it comes to writing).

And right now is really the perfect time for me to be finishing up my first draft, because now I can focus on my last week of class and finals week. Then over Christmas break I'll be able to dive right into revising.

So since November tends to be a productive month for finishing projects, have any of you finished a draft lately?

PerNoFiMo Check-in

All right, because I need to be accountable to somebody for my Personal Novel Finishing Month, I've come to tell you guys my progress.
I am now at 58k on my W.I.P. Whew!
I think I'm going to be closer to 65k when I finish, but I tend to underwrite my first time through, so after everything goes through and it's finished, it should be longer.

And, to amuse you, a video called Harry Potter in 99 Seconds. Because I am both a nerd and easily entertained.

PerNoFiMo

Yeah, I just wrote down PerNoFiMo, not NaNoWriMo. Because while I'm not officially participating in NaNo, I'm trying to embrace the spirit of it.

Last year I tried it, and I failed. I think part of it was that I decided a week before to do it, I didn't have an outline together, and this idea wasn't one that I could just spit out. I needed time to research and plan. So when it came time to write I hit a lot of brick walls and around 20,000 words I realized I would be using none of what I'd written. Plus, I spent a day driving home to California for Thanksgiving and a day driving back up to school. And once at home, I didn't want to write. I wanted to spend time with my friends, family, and cat.

Seriously, how could I write when I hadn't seen my kitty in 3 months?

I wasn't planning on doing NaNo this year. But then, a little idea I had began sprouting. And this one doesn't really need an outline or research, just a general idea and then I could run with it wherever I wanted. So tempting not to try again, except for a few things...

TESTS! STUDY! WORK! ESSAYS! CHORES! LIFE! MORE TESTS! MORE WORK! 

I'm sure you all know how it goes.

And, to top it all off, I'm still on a W.I.P right now that took a back seat when I came back to school.

I wanted to get in the spirit of NaNo though, and so what I decided was to have my own PerNoFiMo, or Personal Novel Finishing Month. This is going to be the month, guys. By November 30, I will have finished the first draft of my W.I.P. I'm currently at 45,000 words and hope to be anywhere between 65,000 and 75,000 by the time I finish. Anywhere between 20k-30k more to go.

Not quite (at all) 50,000 words, but it'll be a great accomplishment nonetheless.

Scrapping it

This weekend I reviewed my W.I.P. and realized that of what I have down so far, I'm not going to be keeping. I believe in the story, the characters, the plot. I love it and I want to continue it, I don't want to give up. So I'm storing away what I have so far and starting new.

At first, I was discouraged about the prospect of starting over again. But then I remembered that back at the Utah Festival of Books when Kiersten White spoke, she brought up a new manuscript she has and how she wrote 100 pages in, and started over twice because the first two times she wasn't telling it right. I figured if a published author has done this, then it's probably not such a terrible thing that I am, too.

That's how I feel about my W.I.P. I don't think I wrote it the right way at first. I wrote it straight through as it'll read in its finished form, when as I actually write it, I need to write *gulp* out of order. That's going to be a fun adventure for me, since I've always written linearly.

So today I finish up my finals, and packing, and cleaning, and tomorrow I start heading home for summer break, where I fully intend to make my dad worry about how much time I'm spending in my room writing.

Have you ever had to completely restart a manuscript?