Tag: nanowrimo

It’s that time of year again: time for the yearly post-NaNoWriMo wrapup post!

First, for the thing that people want to know: I wrote a grand total of 169,047 words spread across approximately a book and a half.

This year’s NaNoWriMo was tough for me, both for writing and my non-writing life. I’m still struggling with the non-writing part, but that’s a post for another time.

The writing part was tough in part because I came up with an idea in the three days before NaNo started and had no idea where it started. The idea started as a young woman going through a bad breakup, moving to a new neighborhood, and checking out the local bar scene in the new neighborhood. What would happen from there? Maybe she would listen to people and bump in on conversations. Maybe she would play matchmaker. I had no idea. After a little bit of pre-NaNo conversation, the bar turned into a haunted bar, one that the main character would experience after being in some kind of emotional pain. Now this was something I could run with. I wound up writing a sequel after wrapping up the first one and leaving a lot of loose ends to tie up, written mostly over the course of 50k weekend (US Thanksgiving weekend) and still incomplete because I have no idea where to take it next. The premise is fantastic (in my humble opinion), so I’ll be coming back to this book.

The other thing that made NaNoWriMo challenging was my non-writing state of mind throughout the month. I had already been slowly burning out for several months before NaNo started, with little time to fully decompress before taking on some other big thing. I had been doing some form of work (including my day job and some occasional freelance work) every day for weeks at a time in the months leading up to NaNo and had a fairly active social calendar. My day job started taking a toll on my mental health during NaNo, making me really look forward to my San Francisco trip and being out of town for Thanksgiving. I had set a goal of 100k in an attempt to keep the bar low for me, knowing that this year was my ten-year streak of writing 100k or more, and I wasn’t going to let that go by without some kind of acknowledgement. So off I went into November without a chance to relax or take a break. I could feel the need for a break early in the month; in fact, reaching 50k in seven days is my second-slowest pace in all ten years of writing 100k or more. I wrote in fits and bursts through much of the months, writing 5k days followed by days of poking out a hundred words just to have a chance at the 30-day writing streak badge.

The literary adrenaline had been sputtering for the past few NaNos, and I have to admit something I’ve still barely admitted to myself: My breakneck writing style of the past few years isn’t quite for me anymore.

“Well, just slow down,” you might say. That’s much easier said than done.

The problem is, I’m terrible at moderation; my fast, on-the-go nature deserves a post of its own. I’m less competitive about writing now than in the past, but the competitive streak is still there. I always try and write to the next hundred, the next thousand, the next palindrome, the next milestone. Oh, I’m a few hundred words away from passing three people on the Faces chart? Time to write. I’m this close to a lifetime milestone? Better get rolling. I always want to see what I can achieve, even if the 50k days are far behind me. But the last few NaNos and the resulting burnout of figuring out what to write after finishing that first book, not to mention figuring out that first book in the first place, have shown that maybe excessive wordiness, at least in the form of 200k+ in a month, isn’t the way.

And that’s okay. I know it’s objectively okay; I just have to convince myself of that. As that kid who never wanted a low A in a subject in school, convincing myself of this isn’t easy, even if writing less means I can spend a little less time writing means spending more time with the wider NaNoWriMo community, something I haven’t done as much of in the last few years. That’s what my trip to San Francisco and Night of Writing Dangerously made clear, even if I was there when the wildfires in other parts of the state made the air quality in San Francisco miserable. (Seriously, I flew over the fires on my first flight from Atlanta to Los Angeles.) I got to see old friends and meet Wrimos from all over the world, including two Wrimos with the same name from opposite sides of the country, plus MLs from London and Germany. (Fun fact: the ML from Germany is one of the newbies I adopted back in 2006. Twelve years later, we finally met in person. We were roommates in the same hostel, in fact.) I also visited the NaNoWriMo office again and made a guest appearance in a virtual write-in.

The words are important, yes, but the community means more to me than writing a bunch of words and stressing myself out about it. That’s what I need to get back to… once I figure out how to get better at moderation. Any ideas?

NaNoWriMo 2016 has come to a close, leaving me with feelings of simultaneous relief and scrambling to find something to do with all this time. You would think I’d be better prepared for this after fifteen NaNos, but no, I’m still figuring out post-NaNo life too.

First, the thing you probably want to know: I wrote 250,025 words in two novels and made up over 1% of my huge region’s total word count. 250,000 words was my easy-to-remember goal for 2016 NaNoWriMo; this aided me in passing 500,000 words overall in 2016 as well as passing 2 million lifetime words across fifteen November NaNoWriMos. I reached my halfway point on day 19, then fell behind and needed to write 100,000 words in the last six days to finish. I hadn’t written 100k in six days since 2010, and for good reason–it may be even harder than completing a 50k day.

(Fun fact: The first million words took ten NaNos. The second million took five. No, I will not be doing the next million in three.)

NaNoWriMo teaches me something different every year. This year, that lesson is: You can do anything, but you can’t do everything. I did a lot this November. This year and last year in particular have tested my ability to keep going throughout the month, much like 2011, when I also ML’d on top of doing many of the things that happened this year (and with a similar word count to boot).

I spent a lot of time traveling in November. NaNoGiving was the second weekend of November, with a bunch of Wrimos (mostly overachievers) in a cabin in the woods, making food, playing games, exploring the farm, and occasionally writing. I got home on Sunday night, then spent Monday and Tuesday working before leaving for San Francisco on Wednesday morning, where I attended NaNoWriMo’s Night of Writing Dangerously.

While this year’s Night of Writing Dangerously was my least productive one to date, with less than three thousand words written, it (along with the overall trip to San Francisco) was my most fun one. I met so many Wrimos, including several I’ve known online for years (and two longtime fellow Wrimos from England and Japan!). I won a word sprint and drank some Cosmonoveltons. I visited NaNo’s office again and packed their tote bags for NOWD and met even more Wrimos and explored San Francisco and ran nearly 12 miles up and down the hills and didn’t die. And then I went home on Monday, worked on Tuesday, and set out again on Wednesday to see family for Thanksgiving.

Unfortunately, all this travel and my mood due to unrelated things in November put a damper in my time leading the @NaNoWordSprints Twitter. I have a hard time leading sprints and multitasking as it is; combining these with my apparently inability to concentrate on writing meant the sprints I led usually consisted of goofing around on Twitter or the forums instead of writing. Since time was at a premium this month, this led to me leading fewer sprints, which made me feel guilty because sometimes I’d see an open spot for sprinting but really need a break from well, everything.

I also found it harder to concentrate on my writing. In the past, I’ve been able to concentrate for lots of word wars and sprints, netting at least a thousand words in fifteen minutes, maybe even ten minutes if I ignore all typos the entire time. This year, this rarely happens unless I leave the house specifically to write. I used to be less productive at write-ins than I would be at home, but this has changed over the last year or two, with write-ins (and generally leaving the house to write) providing with more consistent bursts of writing. This may be related to my shift in how I’ve approached writing over the past few NaNos.

In my earlier years, I would come up with an idea before NaNo, scratch down a little bit of character or plot development, then hit the page writing. This changed over the past two NaNos, when my ideas came at the last minute when panic started to set in, and I couldn’t motivate myself to figure out anything more about the plot or character besides “eh, I don’t know, this character does stuff”. While it worked for one of my novels last year and this year, both drafts of the same novel, it didn’t work so well with the other novels I wrote in 2015 and 2016. Because of having only the vaguest idea of what was happening, I found myself stressing out more, not less. And not having at least some idea of what’s happening makes sprinting more difficult. Maybe I’ll become a planner after all.

Despite (or maybe because of) everything happening this November, NaNoWriMo was still my best one yet, and I’m already counting down the days until Camp NaNo and NaNoWriMo 2017.

How was your NaNoWriMo 2016? Did you reach your goal? Come to an epiphany about your writing? Have a straight-up blast writing?

The end of July’s Camp NaNoWriMo means that the main November NaNoWriMo event is mere days away. Sure, it’s not October yet, but the countdown is already down to the double digits, which is exciting in itself. This time of year also means my mind goes directly to NaNoWriMo–well, even more than usual. There’s so much to be done before November arrives, and no matter how well I plan, not all of those things get done. Heck, not all of those things get done after NaNo is over.

There are Wikiwrimo updates to be done and Is It NaNo Yet? code to be fixed and meals to be cooked and books to read and runs to go on and shenanigans to get into and NaNo flyers to acquire and hang and on and on and on… Oh, and the weather is starting to cool down, which means festival season is upon us, not to mention training for that half marathon I’m running in December. Let’s say that training during NaNo will be interesting, with three of the four weekends already booked for out-of-town events.

And then there are the repeated tasks that I can’t do in August and then declare done through November: making sure my house isn’t more of a mess than usual, for instance. Timing my laundry for minimal actual laundry-doing in November.

I’m already planning easily freezable meals for November, taking into account that I won’t actually be at home for nearly half the month. This also means I need to acquire more plastic storage containers soon; living with people means that my current collection, which I used most of last November, won’t cut it for freezing all these NaNo meals.

While “I sold my soul to NaNo” mode won’t come into full swing until Wikiwrimo becomes a part-time job in September, NaNo planning mode is already gearing up for everything except my novel (or novels, as it seems to be these days). With a goal of reaching 2 million lifetime NaNo November words, I’ve got a lot to write–about 250k words, to be exact, which makes up half my 2016 writing goal. So no pressure, self. None at all. (Fortunately, I’m on track for my overall 2016 goal once my very wordy November is taken into account.)

I haven’t figured out when or where to host my usual intown write-in for NaNo yet. This year will be particularly challenging due to all the travel in November, but I’ll figure out something, even if it means doing regular client work while hosting a write-in.

So… is it November yet? What about now?