I’m not conceding defeat, exactly, because that would imply that I’m a failure, and I don’t believe that. But… I took on a task, and real life came along and bit me.
I set out to write 50,000 new words on THE LAST FAIRY GODMOTHER this month, and I haven’t broken 15,000†. Being the second-to-last day of the month, I’m not going to try to pretend that I could manage all that before the end of tomorrow.
I’ve concluded several things from this experiment:
- I can write a lot when I don’t care if it makes sense.
- I actually prefer it to make sense, even though it’s “just” NaNoWriMo.
- While I started out with characters and a plot, I missed out on the critical VILLAIN element. I finally figured out the villain (and also what he does that personally affects my main characters!), but not until the third week, by which time I’d fallen seriously behind.
- Scheduling something, even something wonderful and fun, that takes up a whole weekend plus two weekday evenings during NaNoWriMo is tantamount to NaNoSuicide. Especially when I still have my day job, and therefore had no weekend to recover from the week and the fun weekend, and still wanted to be able to keep writing. I lost over a week recovering from that.
- Inertia is really helpful, so a disruption in the inertia drags me to a screeching halt, and then it takes me weeks to care enough to speed up again.
- When trying to avoid writing, I knit beautiful things*. :-D
- When trying to avoid writing, I make great progress resolving story issues in other stories that are not my main focus. (Yesterday I realized I could fix two flaws in my vampire story, and I came up with four scenes for a short story version of my first [winning] NaNo story from 2006 about the invention and QA testing of the transporter**.)
Other wins for the month:
- I bought a ton of yarn on sale on Saturday. Including enough to make my Staghorn Sweater. As soon as I finish making my vest (see beautiful things, above), I’ll start on the sweater. Woohoo!
- I haven’t died.
- I got to see or talk to most of my favorite people over the Thanksgiving long weekend.
- There might even be some others, but I’ve already forgotten them. :-/
So, I think my plan is to finish polishing my vampire story, and then decide whether I want to start back in on LFG or write the four scenes for my transporter story. Or maybe even try to figure out what the later scenes of the transporter story might be… Hmm.
——
†Which brings me to 35,000 total!
* And of course I haven’t remembered to take any pictures of it, so no, you cannot see it. Sorry.
** I can’t remember if it had a title. It was wonderful and funny. I still have the novel somewhere, but it is not worth resurrecting in any way shape or form, with the possible exception of the first scene, which was full of fabulous. I seem to have only documented it on the internet on Nov. 1 of that year, here: http://booklizard.livejournal.com/2006/11/01/
