NaNoWriMo is Finished!

With the end of November comes the end of National Novel Writing Month. And the results are in....

I didn't win. I didn't even come close to winning, either.

To be honest, I didn't really figure I would win in my first attempt at NaNo. 50,000 is a lot of words to crank out, especially in the span of 30 days. And when you're someone like me who hasn't really developed consistent and strong writing habits, it's an even more difficult task to do.

That being said, I did "win" in my own way.

First, I started a novel! I'm writing a book! Go me! That's something that's hard, and definitely frustrating at times. Writing is like any other creative endeavor. You hit walls, you get discouraged, you second guess yourself, and there are days when you would rather do anything but put down words on the page. The blank spaces are the most evil things in the world sometimes. Writing would be much easier if the story just wrote itself.

Second, I managed to write 12,175 words in the span of a month. It's barely a fifth of that big 50K, but that is still a lot of words in one month. For my novel, that's only two and a half chapters and just barely approaching my first major plot point (which yikes I feel like I have a long way to go still). But, take the chapters away and just look at numbers, I wrote over 12,000 words. My word document is 37 pages long right now. That's twice the length at least of papers or short stories I wrote for classes in college. That's huge.

Basically, I'm proud of myself for this start. I'm proud I tried something and that I have somewhere to go.

But, I'm warning you NaNo, I'm coming for you next year. Be prepared.