Music Monday: I'm On a Boat (because I was on a boat)

First of all, Blogger's "embed video straight from YouTube" option has been really broken for me lately, and I've noticed it's been broken for other blogs too. Frustrating!

Anyway, today's tune:

Because I was on a boat. There are a number of short cruises that depart from Stockholm to the archipelago and other Baltic states, and they're stupid cheap. 

These cruises, by the way, are Swedes' and Finns' favorite way to party. 

But I wasn't on a boat to party. I was on a boat to write. If you've been reading at all within the last few weeks, you'll know that I've been doing NaNoWriMo. This year, the Stockholm NaNoWriMo MLs ("municipal liaisons," for those who aren't hep to the jargon; they are volunteer event organizers within a particular region) announced that for the first time, we would have be having an all-day "skrivkryssning" ("writing cruise"). 

So Sunday morning I woke up at 5 am (!!) to get to Ropsten and get on the boat to Åland, a collection of islands between Finland and Sweden, at which point we'd be shuttled through the deck there to get on a boat back to Stockholm.  

It was a good time, though I didn't write an outstanding amount despite the eleven hours we put aside to write. It was a triple threat of exhaustion, being already past the 50k mark and thus lacking any sense of urgency, and being too distracted by the goings-on on the boat. One of our members won some James Bond trivia they had going on in one of the bars on ship. There was also Finnish karaoke. At 11 am. 

Never too early for Finnish karaoke.

Still, I wrote over 3000 words, or about twice the daily quota needed to hit 50,000 words in thirty days. Nice, though about on par with the word count I've been averaging for all of November. More importantly, I was able to wrap up my story (my only goal for the day). NaNo total: 72,600 words. Manuscript total: 84,100 words. That's about on par with, among other things, Cry, the Beloved Country.

My sense of relief upon having finished a damn first draft during NaNo (something I haven't done since 2011) was something like Frodo's at the end of Lord of the Rings:

Despite my writing degree, I've don't always take what I write during NaNo too seriously. Sometimes (like this year) I use the month to hash out a lot of work and words on an idea I had earlier. Other times I don't have an idea until just a few weeks before NaNo begins and I write it basically to have something to write during NaNo. This is the first "serious project" whose first draft has seen completion in November, and so that means it gets to be the first to get revised and edited!

I'm not sure what I'll do next year. I have a YA fantasy novel (YES ANOTHER YA FANTASY NOVEL, AS IF THE WORLD NEEDED ANY MORE) I worked on two years ago that I keep outlining and plotting despite myself; NaNo 2015 might be the push it gets to see completion.