I’ve reached 17,011 words and I think, to be fair, I should stop calling it a novel. This is little more than a random effort of disjointed fiction. And while my feelings about it may change down the road, I think I’m ok with that.
Even without a coherent plot and discernible character arcs, it’s still fiction. It’s still an exercise in getting stories out of my brain and onto paper, and it’s still challenging me in ways that only NaNoWriMo can. Maybe I’ll go back later, read 500 words in the middle of the document, and decide that this one little snippet, this tiny patch of fictional real estate, needs to be cultivated into something bigger and better. Maybe not. What I do know for sure is that at the end of November I will most assuredly not have anything to hand over and say, “Here, read my novel.”
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I think it’s time to kill off a few primary characters and start down a new path.