Well, whoops, missed two Fridays in a row of NaNoWriMo-inspired blog posts. This is what happens when I’m away from my desk for holidays.
The absolutely great news, however, is that I beat NaNoWriMo!! I beat it last Wednesday, 11/24, which is not a record for me but is still pretty damn neat. I’m sitting at an equally neat little 57k now; I actually did not take the full long weekend off, and wrote two of the days. I also plan on writing straight through to the end. I like adding bigger wordcounts to the site.
I never did write what I planned to do for the month. I did return to a very long-lost project, however, which was pretty nice. It’s quite close to the end—five chapters—so I’m very excited to have another completed novel under my belt. But the bulk of my NaNo experience this year was dedicated to Mass Effect fanfiction, of all things. Definitely not what I set out to write.
But it was also incredibly fun! As mentioned earlier in the month, this was my first foray into writing science fiction. I guess at its core, most worldbuilding is pretty similar, but sci-fi and fantasy converge noticeably. Yeah, there is still a lot of hand-waving and fictional science, but there is still a base of actual science, and that led to some fun research topics and conversations with a friend. (There is nothing like crowdfunding worldbuilding, let me tell you.)
NaNoWriMo is always a marathon, not a sprint (despite how many word sprints it may contain within the 30 days). I always aim for 2k a day, but unlike previous years, I purposefully let myself have weekends off, for the most part. I think my highest day this year was about 8k words, which is certainly nothing to sneeze at, but it’s not my highest overall. It was just a really good day to help carry me through my rest days.
I never know at the end of November if I’ll be doing NaNoWriMo again next year. I always kind of assume so, just because it’s so ingrained into my yearly schedule and autumn psyche, but life throws curveballs. Usually right before NaNoWriMo, of course. And it isn’t as if I will quit writing in the interim. If nothing else, I have a few more novels to complete, and more Mass Effect fanfic to indulge in.
