NaNoWriMo 2015: My Summer with Gatsby

I realize that it's the 6th December, which means that NaNoWriMo ended a week ago and I haven't reported on it yet! Yikes! I can't believe how fast time is going by.

That being said, NaNoWriMo 2015 was awesome. Busy and crazy and little insane, but awesome.

Thirty days flies by at a ridiculous rate when you are trying to write a novel.

This is my 5th year writing a NaNoWriMo novel, and my 5th year not making 50,000 words.

*sad face*

BUT...

On October 31st, I had no words in the Scrivener document that I entitled My Summer with Gatsby.

On November 30th, I had a little over 31,000 words in that file.

Not the 50,000 words I was hoping for, but 31,000 words is far more words than I started it, so I count it as a win.

Not to mention this fact: I find NaNoWriMo to be an incredibly FUN experience. It's so rare in my writing life that the writing is flowing freely from my fingertips, feeling so fun and easy. But NaNoWriMo seems to function beautifully for me as an experience in which I am uninhibited as a writer, and that's pretty awesome.

This year, I had a great time writing a 1920s inspired novel based off The Great Gatsby. I'm not quite finished with it yet, but I plan to have it done by New Year's Day, so I can spend some time editing in the new year.

To give you a taste of what My Summer with Gatsby is all about, check out a teaser below, and stay tuned for more!

Wren Carrington has been teaching American Literature for 5 years, and her favorite part of the school year? The spring, when she gets to hand out copies of The Great Gatsby and introduce her 11th graders to the wonders of F. Scott Fitzgerald's most famous novel. 
Gatsby, she has always said, is her "literary boyfriend," and jokes that she might have saved him from his fate, had she only the chance to rescue him from the clutches of Daisy Buchanan, who never really deserved Jay Gatsby anyway.

While she's been teased about this by students and friends alike, Wren is firm in her dedication to Gatsby. But on Halloween, when she goes to her friend's party dressed in a flapper girl costume, she is shocked to fall asleep in the car, only to wake up on a train to New York, where a man calling himself Nick Caraway keeps calling her Wren Caraway, his baby sister.   

Sure enough, it is to a small cottage on Long Island's West Egg, that Nick takes her, where Wren finds herself swept into the fabulous parties at Jay Gatsby's mansion, and comes face to face with Gatsby himself. 

Will the summer be enough to do what she's always said she could: save Gatsby from himself?