Well, another year of Nanowrimo has come to an end. It’s been both a good and a bad month for me. I wrote my personal best Nanworimo score ever, and the most I’ve written in a single month period. I wrote 217,019 words in 30 days. In previous years, the novel writing also cut into my blogging since I didn’t have the energy to keep up with it. This year, it didn’t. I even wrote a triple-sized review where I talked about both Witchblade 185 and Switch 2 in the same post.
On the downside, I missed out on a couple weeks of write-ins because of life interruptions, and a few unfavourable shifts at work. My experimental comedy novel ended up being only 16,000 words or so – turns out writing a straight comedy is much harder than an action heavy fantasy/thriller with bits of comedy thrown in. My hourly word count also plummeted while writing the thing. Generally I can pump out somewhere between 2000 and 3000 in an hour, and more than 3,000 if it’s a climax that’s been fully planned for years. With the comedy, I struggled to write 1,400 an hour. I’m still glad I tried it though; it’s good to know that I’m not cut out for comedy, at least not for now. There’s also some funny stuff going on at work, but I’d rather not talk about that online.
For my Blood Rage series, I wrote book 9 of my 12 planned books, and 2 novellas starring characters I feel need a bit more spotlight. Although I know Blood Rage 9 needs some improvement (not all of the perspective characters even interact with all the others, and that’s something I try to do in each book), I’m overall satisfied with how it turned out. I’ll try to salvage the comedy somehow – perhaps I can shorten it into a longer short story and send it to a magazine somewhere. I’m very satisfied with how both novellas turned out, especially since I spontaneously planned the second in the middle of writing the first. Again they both need improvement, more with the second than the first, but it’s just a first draft. First drafts being kind of crappy is to be expected.
My region has several overachievers this month. As I sit in the mad dash to midnight write-in, 3 others in this cafe reached 100,000 this month, including one of the MLs. One of them just reached 100k tonight. Another guy who lives on the other end of town also passed 100,000, after some encouragement by us other overachievers earlier this month. Meanwhile, some of the people here are growing delirious while writing like mad to reach their personal best by midnight. Delirious writers are always funny. Also I must laugh at the fact that, even though they’re contractually obligated to win, the other two MLs won’t win this year. I feel sorry for the one, who’s wicked busy at work and also got sick, but still. I’m so glad I decided to take it easy for the last week after I got so close to my previous personal best (last year I wrote 191,000 words).
As for any Nanowrimo participants reading this, please let me know in the comments how well you did. Whether you officially won or not, you should be proud. You wrote something, or you at least attempted to write something. That’s more than most people can say. Did you make your own personal goal? Did you meet your personal best? Do you like the story or stories you wrote? Are you going to keep writing all year, or try to fix the stuff you wrote this month?
Until next year, this is healed1337 signing off.
healed1337 