I won nanowrimo!

[jack]

So, I was too busy to actually spod about it, other than a constant stream of oblique hints (thank you, cheering section on twitter!) but I did nanowrimo.

I was confident I had MORE time, and ability to schedule a large chunk of time without dropping everything else. But I didn't know if I had enough, or if it was a sensible decision.

But I was excited to try a large personal project and see if I could do it. I've toyed with the idea before, but never felt like it was a serious possibility -- I was always too likely to push myself too hard and flare out, without any ability to pace myself.

I think it was about the most I could possibly manage in a month, without a really significant impairment of work or of all other social things. Not parkinson's law, but that was about as much writing as I could manage in a day, even under good circumstances.

As it happened, the first week didn't really get started, so I ended up writing 2k words a day for the rest of the time, but I stuck to that almost all the way through. And that was usually about right -- I had about that much ideas in my head, and I could mostly go ahead and write them, and after that, I had to *think* about what would happen next.

I really enjoyed the setting and characters, they did often come alive for me (waiting on reports if that actually made it into the fic or not).

When I did pause, it was one of a couple of things. Once or twice, because what came next needed a bunch of stuff to build a story out of (a bunch of characters for the protagonist to meet, or a problem for them to encounter). More often, but less fatally, because what I wanted to happen wasn't clicking, and I had to review what I intended, what was actually needed for the novel, and what I was attached to but could be compromised if it didn't fit.

Many thanks to everyone who expressed an interest in seeing the finished work. I noted everyone down just in case. I am really, really excited to share the novel, and am very serious about getting it to anyone who would like to see. But on balance, it really is better if I fix a lot of minor problems first (things like characters having names Placeholder1 etc :)). That should be fairly easy, but I officially took December as a break where I didn't have to write any more on it :)

Yuletide was comparatively easy afterwards :) I'd already come up with a basic idea, and it took a few evenings rather than just 2 hours to complete 2k words, so a lot slower than one day's nano writing, but still, finished without any last minute panic (go me!)

Comments

[seekingferret]

Congratulations! And yes, that is something I noticed in years when I did both NaNo and Yuletide- doing Yuletide feels considerably easier after NaNo.

[jack]

Thank you!

Now I'm interested -- I'd hoped that yuletide would *permanently* feel easier, but I'll have to see if it does or not :)

[seekingferret]

Well, having won NaNo several times, writing a thousand words for Yuletide is never something I find all that daunting in itself (aside from whatever challenges the fandom and prompts pose), so in that sense, yes, it did permanently make it easier. I picked up a last minute pinchhit this year with two days to write it and I sat down and wrote it in one night, and never had any doubt that I could pull that off. But the years when I'm actually in form of writing 2K a day every day, the Yuletide words tend to really pour out- which is good, because giving up all that writing time to NaNo means I only have a short window to write Yuletide in.

[mtbc]

Yay! mst3kmoxie won too, and now I see her still busy writing extra scenes, editing existing stuff, etc. I wonder when her novel will actually be finished! I think she is happy to be feeling productive though and her work on it does seem to be continuing. She participated in some of the online write-along things, whatever they were called, wherein a bunch of people would together put some effort in.