NaNoWriMo is done! Did I win it this year?
With December rolling around, that means that NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month, has come to a close!
I haven’t intentionally participated in NaNo for several years now, so I thought it’d be fun to commit to it here in 2023.
The project I set out to write was a novella in Tal Tales, a new prequel series to Legend of Tal, that follows Tal Harrenfel in his early life.
The original goal was to write 20k-30k words, or around 100 pages. Easy enough to accomplish when the official NaNoWriMo goal is 50k words, no?
Well… it may have taken on a bit of a life of its own!
I’m (hopefully) finishing the story today at just over 50k words. So it went just a bit overboard!
What’s more, I didn’t just write on Tal Tales! There were a couple of other projects I put some good words into.
So let’s get down to the word counts, shall we? Here they are for my projects:
Tal Tales #1 - 47.8k words
A Battle Between Blood - 7.7k words
Secret Project - 2.2k words
That brings us to the total! Drum roll please…
Total: 57.7k words
That number, by the way, doesn’t count any words spent on outlines, story notes, edited words, or miscellaneous story ideas I jotted down. It would balloon by another 10-20k if it did!
Still, it begs the question:
Did I win NaNo?
Well, it wasn’t 50,000 words on one project, and I completed the main project after the month. So…
…probably not officially.
But spiritually? It’s a total win! This wasn’t the best writing month I’ve ever had (at least, I’m pretty sure) as I’ve had various distractions - getting ill, Thanksgiving, Kickstarter projects, as well as other responsibilities. But, all things considered, I’m very happy with it!
And I think for a project like this novella, the focused nature of the month on writing really helped. It might have had the tendency to protract more, if I hadn’t been determined to finish it within the month.
It also showed me the deadline didn’t have an impact on my striving for quality, as I took plenty of liberties with expanding it where I thought it needed it!
Are there lessons here? I think so. I think my personal way of writing could benefit from setting loose agendas for months and trying to stick to them. This could work for editing as well as writing - perhaps editing especially, as I'm not particularly fond of the task.
That’s it on NaNo. Now, I think I’ll take it a bit easy in December! …Or easier, at least.
Ciao!
~Josiah