NaNoWriMo Wattpad Experiment

October 31, I posted the teaser for a writing experiment on Wattpad. Feeding Frenzy is a Supernatural Thriller, and a great big narrative sandbox for me to play in. The nature of the Wattpad community is friendly, so it’s a good place to find readers who appreciate humour and creative fun in their fiction.

Over the course of 30 days, the goal of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), is to write 50 000 words. Rough draft writing, random plot elements, and writing by the seat of one’s pants are encouraged. Anything to get up to the word count. Since I have done NaNoWriMo before, I added the new challenge of editing and posting at least one chapter to Wattpad weekly.

The experiment yielded some interesting results, including encouraging listings on Wattpad: #53 in Thriller/ Mystery and #69 in Paranormal. Not too bad for a book that isn’t finished yet. Of course the rankings in Wattpad change almost daily so from #53 the story fell out of the listing (out of the top 1000 novels), bounced back to 600-something when I posted chapter six, then dropped out of the top thousand again.

That’s not the important thing. This is:

Last weekend I was so behind on my word count, making quota seemed impossible. I wrote most of the day for two days, producing 12 000 words to catch up. With December here, it’s time to relax with the 50 000 word goal reached. The finished novel will be quite a bit longer. I’m spending a chunk of today sketching out the ending so I can keep putting my 5:00 a.m. writing sessions towards finishing the novel, as well as editing and posting to Wattpad.

The only way to upload something of quality, in my experience, is to make sure the writing of first draft stays well ahead of my Wattpad postings. That means I can go back and forth editing and changing the manuscript for readability and continuity.

Thanks to those of you on Wattpad, Twitter, FaceBook etc. who have encouraged me to keep going. I hope you will be inspired to take on your own fun creative projects, and that you will enjoy reading Feeding Frenzy. Here’s the link to read it for free on Wattpad.