Well, another year of NaNoWriMo is complete and while some are lamenting their personal failures, others are revelling in their wild successes (over 100k in one month? Really??).
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I myself am just happy to have crawled through that finish line, with just over 51,000 words and 2.5 hours to spare. It was different this year, very very different. For one, I was not working on one piece but two, both book four of my series as well as the novella. I have to admit though, when things got tough between my lovers, sexual tensions raising among the thriller genre, it was nice to have my other main character to lean on for a while. Him and his irritatingly good cheer, his natural tendencies to piss off those around him and his overbearing confidence gave me a fun reason to write.
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I found that while I was uncertain of where his story was going to take us, and whether it would be interesting enough to become the novella I had promised, this backstory is actually a good one. I risk saying this right now as a young Jakob is growling at me from within my skull, calling me an "asshole" for even having the balls to insist that HIS story may not have been interesting. Ok buddy, ok, get back into the creative part of my brain. I'll continue with you later, I swear.
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Of course, now that NaNo is over I need to switch gears again, returning to book two for one last self-edit. I had really wanted to have this book to my beta readers by the middle of November, but there just wasn't time. Not with writing frantically, promoting Life's Defeat, author takeovers, getting sick, seven year old's report cards and toddlers learning "no". But now I can, and with 51k words more depth and understanding into the current and future characters in the series I feel I can go back to book two with a new perspective.
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Things will change in the beta process, I know that, it is inevitable. But now that I have a direction for it I feel I can solve a few of the problems I had been mulling around.
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To bring this back around, change is really what it's all about, isn't it? NaNo I mean. The ability to change your habits, to commit to writing a ton of words, whether good or bad, in one month, the choice to disregard any nonsensical fluff that simply needs to be regurgitated before the real writing can be brought out. Or maybe the nonsensical fluff is really useful, maybe it is the focus of your next NaNo project. Hmm...
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Either way, whether you wrote 50,000 words or 5,000, saw it through to the bitter end or realized half way that this was not going to be your month to cross that finish line, I applaud you. Great things come out of Novembers challenge, wonderful novels and poems, playwrights and writers, enthusiasts of fan fiction and serious analysts of Shakespeare all commingling for one month, supporting each other and realizing that it isn't the word count that mattered but just that they wrote something.
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After all, it wasn't the thinking and planning that mattered, it was the doing.
Here's to a successful NaNoWriMo 2015, the hibernation that is sure to ensue for a short while, and the NaNoWriMo 2016 that is only 365 days away....
