By the end of November, I had written over 70,000 words and got a complete first draft done on The Sleep Jumper. Over 400,000 writers around the world participated in this year’s challenge. Only about 40,000 achieved the goal. So I’m in the top 10%!

But, what did I achieve?
• I determined that The Sleep Jumper needs to be Book #4 of the Pentalogy, the one before the final climax, because it ended up going into quite a lot of details about the background of Chrysalis Chronology, Int.
• I was able to write the first draft so fast because, on some days, I was able to spend five hours writing.
• Another habit that helped me keep cruising was that I never stopped to do research about details. If I didn’t know what kind of car the protagonist was driving, or what hospital he worked at, or anything, then I just wrote in ‘??’. I figured that I could add those details later.
• I never went back and read what I’d written the day before, but I did listen to it. I have an app on my iPhone that will read back .pdf files. So, each day after I finished writing on Scrivener, I uploaded the book to my Dropbox account. Then I could download it to the Voice Dream app on my phone, put in my ear buds and listen to it while I drove or did other things. This was very helpful to me.
• I have a first draft that is pretty good, I think. After I finish the editing on The Smart Kid, then I can go back and flesh it out with historical background and other descriptions.
• I also attended a few of the NaNoWriMo write-ins to meet a few local authors. I believe that networking in your industry is important. Connections = Marketing.