This is the end, beautiful friend...

Take that, Arts students and former Gatewayers!

My goal was to write a novel about a flying instructor who loses his medical and is deemed unfit to fly and the ensuing life crisis. It was meant to contain some existential themes. That was probably my first mistake: attempting to have a point, or a message. I also wrote the story in first person narrative which might have been another mistake as it handcuffed me to telling the story through only one person's point of view.

Making the 50,000 words was fairly difficult. There are quite a few parts that are obvious filler, such as several instances where the characters sit around and tell jokes, and the hitchhikers long-winded lecture on quarter-life crisis. I also ended up throwing quite a few pieces from my own life; so much so that people who know me well would probably consider this a roman à clef, and would have no trouble figuring out who each character was in real life. I also resorted to filling in almost the entire backstory and at the end, I cram the existential themes I was going for down the reader's throat instead of letting the reader figure it out on their own.

At one point, I was so desperate to fill the word count that I attempted to write myself into the story (similar to Adaptation.) This might have made the novel considerably better (more funny, anyway) even if it meant sacrficing any scraps of originality I still had left. I decided against this because I would have had to chop out a substantial portion of what I'd already written and this probably would have sunk me in the end. By the third week, I was thinking of about six stories that I would have enjoyed writing more than this one, but it was far too late already. Maybe I'll save those for another NaNoWriMo, if I'm stupid enough to attempt this a second time.

Will I complete a second draft? Not likely. I'd have to rewrite a fair chunk of it and probably double the length of it just to back up all the points that I tried to make. So here's what we're left with:

Broken Wings, by the numbers:

Words: 50,122

Characters without spaces: 212,650

Number of days spent writing: 19

Most productive day of writing: 9,654 words (May 30)

Least productive day of writing: 312 words (May 14)

Usages of the word "fuck" or its derivatives: 86

Usages of the word "shitty": 9

Usages of the word "Albuquerque": 10 (note that the bulk of the story was set in Edmonton)

Number of Big Lebowski quotes: 1, sadly. ("Mind if I do a J?")

Number of titles stolen from songs written by Mr. Mister in 1985: 1

Number of quotes stolen from books or movies: 9 at least

Number of conversations stolen from Facebook wall banter: 2

Number of sex scenes: 3 (possibly 5, depending on who you talk to)

Number of characters whose names are anagrams which form a description of that person: 4

Number of hours I worked (at a job) in May: 187.5

Number of hours worked at a job by some (nameless) people who didn't finish: 0