And to win the challenge, I must write a 20,000 words story or a novella in a month; I could only start writing my story on November 1 and finish it by November 30.
Writing a 20,000 words story in a month?
I wasn’t quite certain if I could win the challenge as I took three months to write ‘The Calovinia’, which I started at the end of 2011 and completed the book in early 2012.
But when November came, I had a bad fever.
I could only wrote 348 words on the first day when I was supposed to write at least 667 words each day to finish the story on time.
But then the next day, I wrote 1017 words and my word count was alright.
Days passed and I tried to write as much as I could each day because there were days when we were away from Kuala Lumpur and I did not have time to write at all.
My blogs’ loyal readers might had realised that I did not write as often as I used to during the month of November.
Finally, on November 22, 2013, I reached my 20,000 words goal and around nine o’clock that night, I finished my novella, ‘Hilmania’ – which is about a place called Himania in the continent of Grender.
And I made a record of writing 2800 words in a day.
My second eldest sister, Aeshah Adlina who took a 30,000 words story challenge, finished hers on November 27, 2013 while my eldest sister, Aiman Amani finished her 50,000 words story on November 29, together with my immediate sister, Anisah Afifah, who took a 23,000 words challenge.
I am so happy and thankful when I finally finished writing the novella.
It was like killing two birds with one stone; first, I won the NaNoWriMo challenge and second, I reached my dream to write a more than 10,000 words story which was what I had wanted to do since I was eight.
Now I hope to write more often in my blog as I used to do before the challenge.
Ahmad Ali JetPlane 