Okay, not one writer. That is what is so wonderful about NaNo. Writing is by nature a solitary activity, and sitting in a group of people all absorbed in their own laptops writing their own novels does not sound like a party by anyone's standards. Still, it is a great way to stay motivated. I tend to write in creative spurts, but I have a hard time finishing. I get about half or two-thids of the way through, and the story starts to sag, and I start to see all the places I went wrong, and I want to start over and fix things. And I get to a point where I don't know where to go next and I don't really care.
But with NaNoWriMo, every word counts. Rule #1 is DO NOT DELETE. Rule #2 is DO NOT GIVE UP. I was up to being seven days behind, but I made up the difference in the last few weeks and pulled across the finish line with hours to spare.
I have done NaNo several times in the past, and this was a year of firsts for me. It was the first year I made an outline the night before from a story I thought of that day. It was the first time I threw out that outline on the first day and started with a story that had been smoldering in my head for a while. And it is the first year that I re-started on the second day with a completely new story that had been gestating but I had not considered ready to be born; but it was my most viable option. It is the first year I had no idea where the story was supposed to go.
That is another thing about NaNo. It forces you to be creative. For the first 20k or so I was writing myself in circles. Then I added witch hunters. I never thought I would until I realized that I needed something new. And there they were. That got me close to 40k before that arc came down. The rest was a first person account filling in the gaps of the first arc. Note: First person in lovely for wordiness. You can throw in so much opinionation and asides and rants. It's wonderful.
Then I was still about a thousand short and spat out half a bonus scene with the witch hunters.
Every year after that first one I have told myself that I won't do NaNo - I don't have time, I don't any good ideas, I'm in the middle of another project - and yet somehow I always do. And I don't regret it. Any of it. Even though all my drafts so far have been shit, and I don't very much think this one is any different, I wrote that damn novel. I have proven to myself that I can can overcome my creative barriers. It does not take skill to write, after all. Skill can be learned. It takes determination and persistence, and I definitely leveled up in that area this month.
Now for a rest. This is also the first year my wrist actually started twinging (at the 47k mark, when I was starting to think I might actually make it). That has not stopped me from starting a new crochet project. I want to get back to my translations - I've been making trips to the career center to see what the heck I can do with my life, and translator is still one of my options. I also want to start reading books again. Am halfway through the third Temeraire book and also for some reason have a strong urge to re-read the entire Chronicles of Chrestomanci. Oh yeah, finals are coming up too.
Blah blah words blah oh wait, I don't have to count them anymore.
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