NaNoWriMo has officially ended! TWO WEEKS AGO!
THIS BLOG IS ONLY TWO WEEKS LATE AFTER A MONTH OF ABSENCE!
HOORAY FOR CONSISTENCY!
...Oh dear...
Anyway, back to the subject of NaNoWriMo! It's over. YAY!
Which begs to question...did I actually succeed?
This seems way more difficult to answer than it should be, but I don't know if I actually 'succeeded' with my first NaNoWriMo.
Why?
Well, I made the 50,000 word mark for November 30. (55,514 words, actually, as of November 30.) So, I succeeded in the overall goal of 50,000 words in 30 days.
However, I do not have a completed first draft. I am in the third act of the draft, yes, but it is not completed.
And I can already see structural issues that will be fixed in revision.
And there are scenes that need to be inserted and removed. (Again, something that is usually fixed in revision).
But, even so, I do not have a complete first draft, which was my personal goal.
So, did I succeed at NaNoWriMo?
Well, in some regards, I didn't.
In other regards, I think I did. I went into this as a learning exercise, as a way to learn more about how I write, how to write faster, and what my process is.
(Part of why I'm really noticing this kind of thing after NaNoWriMo is that I haven't actually written a brand new first draft of a story in...quite a while. I've been mostly working on really heavy revisions on two other books that DESPERATELY needed pretty much a full rewrite to make them work. So it's been a while since I've actually written a first draft of a book. I'm still kind of in revision mode...)
*Ahem*
Anyway...back on topic...
I'm going to focus on the positive side of this.
Here's what I learned from my first NaNoWriMo experience. I know this is just for my own personal writing style, but maybe it would be helpful for other people to see different writing processes. Maybe someone else writes like this, too.
Or maybe I'm just weird. Who knows?
