As I’m writing this, NaNoWriMo isn’t quite over, but I finished the goal of 50,000 words last night, and thought I would share my experience with NaNo this year with all of you.
This year, I was able to write at least 1670 words every day, meaning that I was over par every day. To be honest, this was just so I could receive a badge--a digital one, mind you--from the NaNoWriMo website saying I hit par every day. Even on days when I was struggling to write, either mentally or because of my chronic pain, I forced myself to hit par, because filling in a little badge icon was important to me. And I knew that if I hit that goal, I made decent progress on my novel that day, and that was definitely important, too.
Some days, getting the amount of words written that I needed to was a challenge, and took me all day to do, and other days, I could sit down at my desk, my fingers flying over the keyboard, and get my writing done within half an hour. That’s the interesting part about NaNo, since every day is different as you try to obtain your goal. There were some stretches where my word count was over 1800 words every day, and there were others where I was just barely making par. All I care about is that I managed to finish NaNoWriMo three years in a row, and I have the certificates to prove it.
I will say, doing NaNoWriMo on a new project made it difficult for me to balance the other projects I was working on, especially on days where getting to 1670 words was an all day ordeal, since I just didn’t have the time or mental energy to be editing, plotting, and writing my other projects. My first year in succeeding at NaNo, I was writing constantly on like three different projects, and thrived on that. This year, however, with an increase in my chronic pain, balancing four plus projects at once was a lot more difficult than I was expecting.
So, what comes next? I’m hoping to keep doing the NaNoWriMo word count goal for the month of December, since I want to give myself a good start on the novel I started writing, “Love Through Anguish”. In the new year, I’m not going to keep up with that, but I’m hoping balancing all of my projects goes a bit smoother. Setting realistic deadlines is a crucial part of that, which you can read more about next week.
No comments:
Post a Comment