As readers who are really overthinking this may suspect, the just-barely-over-goal number means that the story was done at somewhat under fifty thousand words, and I ended up going back through it and finding areas that would benefit from another paragraph or two.
No entire filler chapters, though!
And only a smallish amount of using the “anything at all fits in here” device that many of my NaNoWriMo stories have (in this case, the quasi-entheogenic drug “White Stripe”).
I used GPT-style AIs only for things like “a list of obscure but excellent wines”. And even in those cases, I typed say “hotel names in Missouri” more often into Google than into say AIDungeon.
This turned out to be basically a love story (happy ending and all, and I don’t think that’s really a spoiler), with a few oddities, and some areas that are wide-open for a sequel; maybe next November we’ll explore what Agnes’s father was really up to, and whether he’s alive.
I’ll be reading it over (unless I don’t) for the rest of the month, but basically it’s done. Woot!
For those coming in late, a list of all the NaNoWriMo novels prior to 2020 is (for some reason) here. To that list we might add:
- In 2020 I wrote All Reality, inspired by playing so much with GPT-style AI text generators, in which the characters mostly deal in various ways with the fact that reality is infinitely malleable.
- And now in 2021 I wrote Snack Bar Only, a novel based on an ancient story idea of mine, about an unnamed protagonist who travels between golf course restaurants (and snack bars) in his red pickup truck.
So that’s eleven novels! Or novellas, really, or something. I suspect the number of readers is of roughly the same order of magnitude as the number of writers :) but hey, it’s a lot of fun.
ceoln 