Whoo-hoo! I did it once again. Made it through my second NaNoWriMo challenge in the month of November and emerged with a new novel! It’s such a rush when you see that word count hit 50,000 words, even if that isn’t the official ending point. This novel is currently still quite rough, but hey, the concept is down. Now it can bloom from here.

If you missed my last post and are wondering what the heck NaNoWriMo is, it is National Novel Writing Month. The challenge is to start November 1 and write a little bit each day until you hit 50,000 words, which is a novel-length manuscript. I took the challenge in 2022 and emerged with The Last Farm, which is now published. It was my first novel to break genre and take you closer to my home in Schuylkill County, PA. Now this year my project takes you a bit further north in the county, to the coal fields of the anthracite region.

My working title (which totally may change before the story is completely done) is “Heart of Mine”. And yup, you guessed it, it is about coal miners. More specifically, it is about the town where my dad and grandparents grew up, Mary D. Funny name for a town? Yup. That’s a long story in itself. If you look it up on Wikipedia there are about five pictures and two sentences that describe the place. But I’ve got three generations of relatives, some still living in the town, to pull oral history from, and boy was that fun to work with. The story is set in 1938, the year the town got together and blew up the mine. I can’t give away too many secrets yet, as the beauty of fiction is that I can manipulate the storyline, but I can tell you there is a lot of local history woven in and of course, a bit of a love story.

I managed to get the story out this year in just 22 days, from November 2 (yes, I got a slow start) to November 23. Total word count is sitting at 50,587, but I still have some holes to fill, so that will rise. I am excited to go back and weave in more research, more oral history, and really bring out the drama behind this plot.

To all my fellow #NaNoWriMo participants, I wish you the best of luck! And to the rest of the #NaNoWinner2024 folks out there, CONGRATULATIONS!