November is over, meaning National Novel Writing Month has concluded. As mentioned in my last post, I hit the word count goal of 50 thousand words on November 16th, so I “won” NaNoWriMo pretty early on.
In that post, I wrote about trying to hit 100 thousand words by the end of the month as a stretch goal, but I also emphasized that I didn’t want to burn myself out to try to achieve that. I’m proud to say that I cared for myself and didn’t push for an additional 50 thousand words during the last 14 days of the month.
I get really fatigued in addition to getting bad cramps when I have my period, so when it came at the end of the month, I decided not to push myself to write through my fatigue. If I felt up to it, I still wrote a little bit, but I didn’t push myself to write more than I felt I had the energy to write.
The Americans Group here in Perth also held our Thanksgiving Celebration on the last Sunday of the month. While that was a lot of fun, I found it incredibly draining and needed two days to recover from the energy expenditure of being outside during a heat wave with a big group of people. There was a lot of noise and stimulation, and even though I enjoyed myself, those sorts of activities really take it out of me. So, I took two days off to rest myself mentally and not write. After which, the words started to flow again.
All this is to say that I didn’t hit 100 thousand words in 30 days. But I’m more than okay with that because I still finished out the month having written 81,063 words, which is the most I’ve ever written during NaNoWriMo. So, I’m happy. And not just about the amount of words that I wrote. I’m happy with the quality of what I wrote as well. I feel like I’ll have a pretty solid first draft by the time I finish, which isn’t to say it won’t need editing, but I don’t feel like this draft is the absolute mess that some of my previous NaNo-produced drafts have been. I’m also happy that I didn’t push myself to try to write an additional 19 thousand words to hit that 100 thousand-word stretch goal because if I had, I would have needed at least a week to recover my energy, and the words would not have been of the quality that I prefer.
I’d much rather take December to finish this novel draft the way I want it to be than to have tried to throw as many words on the page in November as possible. I don’t think that would have been healthy.
The Stats
So, the final word count was 81,063 (which honestly boggles my mind a bit).
My average daily word count for the month was 2,702 words a day if you count the days I skipped. If you subtract those two days, I average 2,895 words a day.
My highest daily word count was 6,339 words written on November 12th.
My lowest daily word count was 206 words written on November 26th.
But these lovely graphs don’t show how much fun I had, the ah-hah moments, or the times I spent hosting writing sessions to help my fellow NaNoWriMo participants designate time and space for their writing. They don’t show the times I made myself laugh, cry, or smile. They don’t show how much of myself I put into my writing this month. A graph can never properly convey just how proud of myself I am for having achieved what I have.
So, What’s Next
NaNoWriMo may be over, but my novel isn’t. I still have somewhere between a quarter and a third of it left to write. So, while I’ve got the momentum, I’m going to keep writing until the draft is finished.
I’m not going to push myself to hit huge daily word counts, but I will write every day until the draft is done, and then I will take some time off from writing to focus on other creative pursuits like sewing and embroidery.
I’m going to catch up on my reading list.
I’m going to enjoy the holidays, go swimming, take my dog for walks, and try to see out the end of this year in peace.
And when the new year comes, I’m going to look for a new job (I was made redundant back in September), and we’ll see where the writing spirit takes me.
But for now, I’m simply happy to be back writing novels again. I love being able to spend so much time with my characters, building my worlds, and having the time to live in the story. As much as I’ve enjoyed my foray into short stories over the last few years, novels really are my preferred writing length.
If you participated in NaNoWriMo this year, how did it go?
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