The NaNoWriMo Finale

I’ve been busy the last few days, recuperating from all this novel writing. I’ve been going Christmas shopping, spending long hours with friends, going on walks, and sleeping. A lot of sleeping.

But I’m so happy to say that all this R&R is well-earned. A few hours before the 12:00am deadline on Dec. 1, I clocked in 50,385 words for my novel, making the whole thing now total 87,632 words! It’s still not done unfortunately, and I already see where a loooot of rewriting needs to happen, but I’m proud of what I achieved this month.

Even better, this word count doesn’t include the updates and book reviews I wrote for this blog nor a chapter of fanfic that I wrote this month, so my monthly word count is probably closer to 60,000. How awesome is that?

This marks the first time I’ve ever “won” NaNo, and I’m a mixture of impressed, relieved, and perplexed at myself. All this writing potential and I’ve never tapped into it like this! [Owen Wilson voice ]Wow!

I remember how in the past writing 1,000 words a day seemed so daunting and impossible to do consistently, but I just did so much more than that for the entire month. Now, I’m excited to embrace this daily writing habit. I’m even writing this article now despite the fact that I told myself I’d chill for a week, reading but not writing, but I had to write something! Even tomorrow, I’ll be eyeing a few other stories I’ve been neglecting, debating what I’ll write for first.

I do wish that I could have gone to an in-person write-in to meet other writers, but a local one that I was available to go to got canceled and then all my Saturdays filled up quickly with other matters. But I had a lot of fun with the virtual write-ins I joined, both NaNo’s and the ones I was doing with my best friend Jennifer through our podcast, Femme Trash. Sometimes we even had a special guest — Ariel from Within Walking Distance!

I’ve been thinking about doing Camp NaNoWriMo when it rolls around because I really want to finish my current project so that next November, I will be tackling a brand new story with brand new characters. Wouldn’t that be ideal?

How did you guys do? I hope you know that I’m super proud of you for everything you’ve done this month, and you should be proud of yourself, too, for being brave enough to tell your story.