NaNoWriMo 2013 complete

This says it all.

I've completed NaNoWriMo for 2013 with 50,236 words written over the last 26 days. Now I need to set it aside for a while before the editing process begins, which I suspect will take a long time as I decide what to leave in and what to discard, asking myself how much of the truth I tell and what purpose does it serve. It seems an awful lot of effort, given the limited readership it will have, but it was never intended as a commercial venture and I never planned for the task to grow to the enormity it did.

I set out to write the history of the Holmyard family from the Deloraine area of Tasmania and the tale of two convicts grew with the telling as more emerged from the records. Along the way I've encountered key characters on the periphery of murders committed, and free- born Tasmanians imprisoned in the gaols their forebears tried so hard to avoid. I've followed the trail of the love of drink and the violence it spawned through several generations, and the heroes who gave their lives for their country, leaving wives and mothers to grieve in their eternal absence. In between these stories are the fragments of information about the children lived in the harsher places of institutional care, cut off from their biological families through the need for survival and the endless search for that elusive respectability.

How much of the story will I choose to tell?

Well, that remains to be seen, but I've enjoyed the journey into the past and back again.