NaNoWriMo 2017:

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It turns out the real novel is the backstory you figure out along the way (in week three).

My initial plot bunny for this story was that a boy stumbles upon a Baba Yaga style house (but it's crow-legged, instead of chicken-legged), only... it's alone. It's lost its person. And it follows the boy home, and recruits the boy's help to try and rescue said person.

And it was ... going okay-ish. Until house and boy were underway, and I had to figure out exactly Who house's person was, and how person was connected to the giantess troll, who was the next person the house goes to for help, and the boy has to deal with...

So I said to myself: okay, I'll just write a quick backstory, and tack it onto the front of this document (so the backstory's word count is part of my NaNoWriMo's total), and go on from there... I just write it in "fairy Tale" style -- bare bones, almost, so it won't take too long.

18,383 words later (!), it turns out this is the complete story, with a beginning, middle, another middle, a third middle, and an end that has enough to it to stand on its own.

I crossed the 50K word mark on Monday (including all the words and false starts in my original story idea), but I wanted to keep going so that I could earn the "update your story for 30 days in a row" badge, which I'd never done. I wanted to beat my previous word count record, which happens to have been on a story I was trying too tell over, so not fully in the NaNo spirit. And I also wanted to get to my version of the "happy ever after ending."

(Which I did at about 3 this afternoon)

Back to public reality tomorrow... *blah*