Current total – about 7k of fiction. Got snowed under by work + life, didn’t engage with the community, dismal nanofail. Oh, and got distracted by, y’know, the End of the World (at least, the bit immediately local to me.)

On the bright side, I’ve gotten into a routine of ‘work on my own stuff before 10am, then switch to for-pay’, which has the dual benefit of giving me a window to work on my own stuff guilt-free, and gets me up earlier. That 7k will keep on growing for another few months, and I’m going to count that as a personal success.

@Gareth:

Hey, 7k of workable fiction is a beautiful thing — in no way a failure. Good stuff.

(And you underwent the end of the world? Wuzza? You just mean snow?)

– c.

The whole Irish sovereign debt crisis/bailout thing.

Well, NaNo is over here in New Zealand now, so I’m done for the month. I clocked in at 127,649, which – I think – puts me on top of New Zealand. Last I checked, anyway; need to look that up again.

Anyway, I didn’t find it as much of a challenge this year as I did last year – when I barely reached the goal with only a day or two to spare – but it was still amazingly fun. I finished my first novel on about 80,000 words and started a new one, which soon degenerated into crack fanfiction, but . . . oh well. It was a great experience, even if I did sacrifice a bit of study time (OK, a LOT of study time) in order to pound the words out. I’m happy with my wordcount – it’s far more than I ever thought I would get, and the experience was fantastic.

Personally, I don’t think NaNo is as bloody and awful as people make it out to be. I didn’t struggle to write 50,000 words in a month; last year I was rarely behind and this year I just streaked off like a nut. As long as the ideas keep flowing, the words do too, and that’s the beauty of it. That is why I do NaNoWriMo.

You know, I somehow missed that you were in Ireland.

Yeah, I can see that being apocalyptic.

– c.

@Thomas –

You wrote 127k…

In a month?!

– c.

Er, yup. Pretty much, yeah. No guarantee it’s any good, but hey! That’s what these two months off school that I have are for! Right?

. . . right?

What, a holiday, you say? Fie upon thee, naysayers.

I procrastinated horribly (just like last year). Last year, I more or less waited until the last three days to really push to win. I managed to make it (44k in 3 days) and produced a pretty half-decent draft, considering the circumstances (I have been tinkering with the draft on and off for the past year).

This year I promised myself I wouldn’t do the same. And that turned out to be a lie. I did the exact same thing. I’m still hanging in, with just a little over 20,000 words left to go. I’ve been writing about 1500 to 2000 words per hour pretty steadily, so I’m still optimistic that I can cross the finish line. The story won’t be finished at 50,000 words, so I’m hoping to ratchet down the crazy and actually use some discipline in December to finish the story.

I’ve won the past two years (first with a hot mess of a “novel” that I haven’t touched since) and I refuse to “lose” this year (even though it’s sort of silly and the ~30,000 I’ve got is still pretty decent. But I want that damned winner’s badge!)

I completed a Nanowrimo about five years ago. After adding more material, I ended up with a dystopian novel about a combat-trained librarian (libraries went private and militarized during the Paradigm Revolution) whose mother was posthumously convicted of suffocating an entire Moonbase. After she’s framed for murdering her mother’s co-pilot, she has to figure out whether or not she wants to keep hiding from the voracious Press, or risk finding out the truth behind her mother’s actions.

I edited the hell out of it and had three betas read it, poked and fiddled and decided it needed something . . . but I’m still not sure what. I’m up for ideas. . .

I am not impressed with what I’ve written for Nano. I finished at 50,222 but it looks more like a collection of short stories than one complete novel. I’m just glad that it’s done.

@Ren:

Are you going to try to rescue it?

– c.

@Sarah:

Man, combat-trained librarians? That sounds pretty bad-ass. Hopefully you’ll keep workshopping it, looking for the missing component.

Because that sounds cool.

– c.

@Brian –

Damn, 2000 words per hour. Okay then.

Yeah, I would say not to be overconcerned with “losing” — this is one of my complaints about NaNoWriMo, that it assigns a arbitrary and somewhat nonsensical “win condition” to an arbitrary and nonsensical word count tally.

A writer only loses when he gives up on the novel. A writer does not lose by failing to complete NaNoWriMo.

– c.

This is I think the fifth year of NaNo for me, but I believe I am outgrowing it. I find I have to take a little more time with the books, let them play out a little slower than in the past. I’ve gotten about 17K on the current version of NaNo 2010. I like it though, some interesting things happened. Genre? Fantasy. For me it’s easier to make up a world than to have to play by the rules of this one.

I did finish the first two years I did NaNoWriMo, but those books are sitting in my documents folder waiting for… um… someone to edit them. The second year’s NaNo book has been a bane just because it won’t settle.

Unfortunately, work and real life have gotten in the way of spending a month just cranking out the words. But the book will go on. I plan to keep working on it.

I’ve got just shy of 10k. Between all the electrical problems that keep popping up and an army of other things coming and going and spinning me around until I puke, there just wasn’t much energy left at the end of the day (provided I could turn the desktop on without the whole place going on the fritz).

But the novel will march on, slow and steady through another month of distractions and demands. That or I’ll shelve it for now, pull out the one I wrote over the summer, and give it a serious round of revisions. Goodness knows it needs it.

@Kate:

Might I recommend a two-pronged approach?

Segment your time — spend a little time each day writing, and a little time each day editing. Will be slow going, but progress is progress.

– c.

That’s the other option. I just don’t want to stretch my December too thin. It’s full of company, weekend guests, holiday parties, frequently visiting mothers, and a huge 12 day stretch of the spouse being home and up my butt.

Though really, that sounds ten times more burn-out proof then focusing on one or the other.

I have around 6.5-7K words split between 4 shorts in varying states of completion (since my “novel” was actually an anthology of sorts) and a story bible for an idea that sprung from an anecdote about JFK and Project Orion.

The shorts were written to spec (<5K words) and outlined going in. I attribute my success to outlining. I have discovered that I am not a pantser at all. In that regard, I consider this past month to be a huge success.

I made the 50,000 15 days in. I have worked as a writer for years so wordcount wasn’t as big of a deal as silencing that inner editor.

I liked the accountability of doing something “collective.” Sort of like, I hate running. Maybe if I am being followed by an ax murderer, but even then I might just give up a mile or two in and let said ax murdere hack me up because I want to die anyway. But, when I run the Susan G. Komen, there is something about 5000 other people around me that makes me morph into a “runner.” A very slow, sad and pathetic runner, but a runner nonetheless.

NaNoWriMo was the same. I had my novel heavily researched and outlined, but I kept putting paying and NF work ahead of it. I already had 38,000 when I started and needed exaclty 50K to finish the first draft of my scientific thriller.

Blasting through the first draft was fun, and it really helped me see weak spots I need to rethink and do more research.

Thanks for the great blog!

I liked the accountability of doing something “collective.” Sort of like, I hate running. Maybe if I am being followed by an ax murderer, but even then I might just give up a mile or two in and let said ax murdere hack me up because I want to die anyway. But, when I run the Susan G. Komen, there is something about 5000 other people around me that makes me morph into a “runner.” A very slow, sad and pathetic runner, but a runner nonetheless.

@Kristen –

I quite like that way of looking at it. That deserves some attention, I think — writing is a very solitary affair and this changes that dynamic (somewhat, at least — or maybe it changes the *feel* of the dynamic).

Well done!

– c.

I finished my NaNo 0-draft on the 18th with about 55k words. I enjoyed finishing, it was perhaps the most important reason for me to do this; before I was in an endless loop of starting over unsatisfied with the first 50 pages. And I learned a whole bunch about myself as a writer.

Seriously- 127,000 words? Absolutely amazing. My brain was reduced to a quivering pile of jello on the 18th, and I stopped making much sense for a couple of days.

Won in 2006 & 2009, entered but did not win in 2007 & 2008.

Right now, I’m at 44K, taking a break from the final push. With luck and more caffeine, I’ll clock in at 50.1K by midnight.

I had a loose outline, which I allowed to slip as the story dictated. This was a terrible month for me to attempt NaNo, with real life stuff forcing several zero word count days. That’s hard ground to make up, but there it is, and here I am.

2006 needs to be rewritten entirely, 2009 is a lumbering hunk of thud. This is a good story, snappy and interesting. With extension and revision, including more fleshing out of the villain’s motivations, I’m guessing it’ll finish at ~75K.

Today, however, I just need that last 6K

As to why I did it? Because I had a bunch of people tell me they’d love to read a book I wrote. What can I say? I’m a drama queen and an ego monkey; having people self-identify as “Tony Noland fans” and almost insist that I write for them is like white chocolate coated crack.

Just finished the the last few bits, scraping in on time. I’ve always been the same with deadlines…just in time….got a fair few darlings to kill in the editing, but I’ve decided not to rush that. The story is far more coherent than I thought it would be, but needs some attention here and there. The last 47 words before 50k were the hardest, but once I had those down I seemed to keep going. The good thing is that I still like the idea I started on the 1st…a few weird unconscious experiences…for some reason my characters did a lot of reaching behind, into or under things – a lot seemed to be hidden in dark places. Just about everyone cried at some point, giving me a challenge to describe similar experiences differently and two separate characters for dead when they were in fact sleeping and a third was also thought dead, but had been rescued by a tramp. Another character still thought someone was injured when they were dead…..my chain of characters sometimes seemed a bit soap opera…but who cares, I did it and it was fun…I am planing on editing over the next year or so…write in a hurry, edit in time…;->

Like many of the commenters here, it was really more about silencing the inner editor than worrying about word count. (of which said editor is still a basement-door pounding annoyance every now and then)

It’s my first nanowrimo and i’d gotten more neurotic than I had to. I’d outlined each chapter and now i’ve exceeded the word count, but the novel is a piddling, shameful mess of badly written diction and i’m not even halfway through the second act.

Thusly, I’m tempted to give up on the novel, write it off as a great learning experience, and go on to writing another one. Arbitrary deadlines be damned. Yet I wonder if I would be as motivated without the community that makes nanowrimo so unbelievably awesome. My sentiments mirror @kirsten’s, where part of the great joy came from running the race alongside so many others.

Props to an amazing blog. Am counting on you for more kicks in the proverbial writing ass, methinks.

Wow, you’re the inquisitive one today, aren’t you? Okay, here are some answers for ya’:

I will probably end the day with around 40K words, which is 37K more than last year If I’ve learned anything it’s that I’m incapable of being a fast drafter. It’s just not in me.

That said, I have gotten a lot out of the experience. I wrote my first original fiction novella (I used to write fanfic – don’t judge). I met lots of great people online and in person who will be great support and resources for the massive editing job I have ahead of me. I also learned to listen to my characters, even when they decide that the basic premise of my book and 2/3 of my outline need to be revised.

My story (m/m romance, as if the avatar didn’t give it away) will hopefully be complete today *fingers crossed* I plan to revise the hell out of it and submit it to publishers.

46k words and presently stuck at my day job (shh don’t tell the boss that I’m here!)… I feel like I’ve been running a marathon and the last few meters are uphill.

I’m doing it because I had an idea for a comic series and I had to lay down the story in written form before I could start drawing. I’ve also failed NaNo the past two years and was starting to feel discouraged. All the more reason to get back on that horse!

I knocked out close to 6000 words on Sunday to try to finish. Thought I had another 1500 to go and planned to finish the next day.

Put all of my chapters into a single document and low and behold…I write better than I count. I was already at 50425 words.

Seems my adding a sentence here and a paragraph there and not keeping accurate daily word counts helped in the end.

Was my FIRST nanowrimo and I had a great friend who is already published helping to keep me motivated with 15 minute “word wars” a couple few times a day.

I so couldn’t have done it without having that one writing buddy.

This was my third NaNo, and I ended up hitting 50k on the 15th. I was originally going for 100k, or,’ whenever I get the damn novel finished’, but the story morphed into something far more epic than I had anticipated, and wound up being so long-winded that I was barely a quarter of the way through the accursed outline by the time I hit 50k. I’ve since realized the story will function much better as a graphic novel, but I still got the good experience I was looking for: writing like a madwoman and flexing my prose muscles.

Why didn’t I keep writing after the 15th, besides the story becoming a mutant? School. It’s my final semester of college and I’m getting buried under projects, papers, presentations and the like. I figure it’s the last time I have to do all this school junk and might as well do a good job, so I decided to put all my energy into my homework. After I graduate, for the first time in my life I can put writing first, so It’ll be worth all the work once school is over and I get my diploma (and swiftly become a wage slave).

As well as to test my aspiring novelist chops, I do NaNoWriMo mostly for the community. I’ve made some wonderful friends writing each year on the forums and on Twitter. I’m starting to shift into being more concerned with pacing and plot length over wordcounts though, but I still expect to participate in the fun next year. Because that’s what it is for me ultimately – a lot of fun.

Best of luck to everyone still writing, and congrats to everyone who has won. You’re all awesome!

Whooooaaaah Thomas!

I did 75K on the book (ending Sunday) and finished the first draft. Spell check was turned off and I didn’t research anything (I ended up calling the mom “Enoki” because I didn’t want to look up a suitable name, and that’s the least of it). The ending sucks asssssss. I spent less than 2K on the big battle, and about 6K on the aftermath. Lame.

The rest of the book was a stretch somehow, but I’m having a hard time identifying why. It felt hard, heavy? A life changer of some kind that I don’t know about yet. It was fun to write, though, because the main character’s such a punk. My favorite part to write was when she grabbed her mother’s face and forced her jaw open to see if she has a bug in there.

Tonight, our local writer org meets to pass out prizes for things like, “Worst opening line” and “best excuse.” It has been a blast hanging out with these folks.

Facts and figures :
I’ve never done a NaNoWriMo before so I set a target of 2K words per day, figuring that if I missed a day or so I’d still be home free. I discovered that I can write 4-500 words using Writeroom on an iPod Touch on a crowded train for 40mins, where there’s no space for a laptop; so by the time I got home each evening I already had 800-1K and that helped considerably. I actually only had three days where I wrote nothing at all, two of those were after reaching 50K which I did on 25th Nov. I’m now at 55K and will continue this schedule until I complete the story at an estimated 60K.

I learnt:
That if I make myself write, even if it’s terrible dialogue and poor characterization I can still move the story forward and I’ll have something to revise, and occasionally might just write a line that I like!
That I can write more than I ever thought possible and in a shorter time, my longest story prior to this was 1500 words and more often flash fiction.
That getting something, *anything* down on paper means I’ll revise it when I don’t feel like writing something new, because the urge to edit is irresistible.
That I must not read back more than a few lines or I will want to edit instead of continue and then I get twitchy when I can’t.
That I thought I was a pantser but I work much better with more planning. Since I couldn’t start before Nov. I spent time plotting and creating characters, I even had 30 points to the story, although I veered away from that outline halfway through.
That Scrivener makes life so much easier and now I want a Mac.
That sites like TerribleMinds are great motivators.

I would love to be a writer when I grow up, I’m only 52 now, but let’s see how appalling it still is after editing and editing and .. editing.
I really look forward to trying it again, I’m hooked now!
Genre – I’m going to have to work on that one. It started as a murder story with a bit of urban fantasy but then there’s a romance in there too so, get back to me next year?
I loved the social aspect but then I socialised in a virtual world (Second Life) and I wouldn’t have even attempted it without the help of two writers groups there.

@Judi —

That’s awesome! Thanks, too, for the kind words.

And you made use of writing groups inside Second Life? I’d love to hear more about that. How’s it work?

– c.

I failed this NaNoWriMo, but I’m not really surprised. I only decided I was going to do it a week before November because all my writing buddies were doing it. But at the time I was going through a transition of working, studying and trying to fix up my house all at the same time, which I never did before. Then my younger brother moved in with me. Needless to say, I sort of mentally quit NaNoWriMo a while ago. But honestly, it was more like I stopped caring if I won or not. I didn’t even try anymore.

However, I did clock in 16,086 words between 1 novel, 2 shorts and 3 blog posts (that’s right I decided to count them since I’m AWFUL at updating my blog). I also sort of created the habit of tracking how much I write a month, which I plan on using next month.

In fact, I may have failed NaNoWriMo 2010, but I’m still going to keep thinking I still gotta write so-so words every day going into December. My goal now is just to created a writing habit. I plan on finishing those short stories, novel and keep posting my blog, despite NaNo is over. So I hope that at least, NaNo helped me take off again (a bumpy, pathetic take off) towards my writing dreams.

My first and only NaNoWriMo success was in 2008. I got so fed up of never taking my writing seriously, never finishing anything, that when I was 9 days in and 12k words behind, I snapped. I caught up in a single day and then wrote 3k a day till the 30th, writing 86k words that month, completing the zero-draft of my first novel (third attempted novel but first with a finished draft).

I rewarded myself by going to a writing workshop in Cincinnati and when I got back, for the first time in my life, I felt I could actually do this. I can be a professional writer.

The bad news is that novel has been sitting there for 2 years without being revised. I have collected tons of notes on HOW to fix/re-write it, but I haven’t finished or even started the actually re-writing process (though I did rewrite the first several chapters, though I plan on re-writing those re-writes SIGH).

I really wish I knew the best way to re-write a whole novel. And I discovered procrastinating revising is a whole lot easier than procrastinating writing.

My NaNo10 failure is my NaNo08 novel’s sequel, so it was at least fun to start. I really wished I could focus more on it cause it has so much potential. If I hadn’t been so bogged down with fear of not writing productively and making a living, I probably would have been able to put more words down. Cause I really love the story. Even if my writing is crap lol.

Oh and to answer some of the other questions you asked that i failed to answer…

I finished NaNo08 and probably would have won this year too if I done them, by using Word Wars with writerly friends on IRC chat. We just write for a set amount of time and see who can write the most during that time. I can write a little over 2k an hour during those wars. I use Focuswriter to focus and just write away for stretches of time. The downside is that after word warring for a while, it’s hard to write by yourself.

My novel’s genre is dark fantasy, though I also plan on working with science fiction and YA in the future. In NaNo09 I started a YA modern fantasy. That year I failed because I tried to rewrite NaNo08 and write a new totally different novel at the same time and that just didn’t work for me.

Geez, that’s a lot of questions!

I’ve been doing NaNo since 2004. I’ve never lost. This year was the easiest despite a couple of dead weekends: I just took the 1700-2400 a day at a steady slog. It helps that I write so much in between Novembers. This story is at 50k and no more than 6k to “the end”, although the entire text is a structural mess. I usually hew pretty close to a plan, but this year’s NaNo was exploratory, just casting around to see what was interesting and worth writing about. (It’s contemporary fantasy.) Usually my characters are pretty reliably consistent from start to finish, but these guys are all over the map. I don’t think I’ll bother going back to fix this one. You hide a few dozen failed novels under the bed and suddenly it doesn’t matter if you just throw another one on the pile.

I love the NaNo community, although my focus has changed; in past years I’ve enjoyed doing things with and among a whole lot of people, and this year I’m more interested in finding long-term writing buddies. I always meet fantastic people through NaNo.

Every December I say I’ll never do it again, and every October the energy sucks me back in.

Did I cover everything?

Second Life (SL) is very immersive and better than any web group I’ve joined. Messages to the groups will include links to blogs such as this, talks from published authors, plus word wars and other NaNoWriMo specific aids, like keeping a word count over your characters head and having a mock book cover at a group meeting place with a word count too.

I could kill two hours after work, buy a meal and then join a real life group for an hour or so, alternatively I can go straight home, get comfortable, write a few hours and join a group in SL whilst lounging before my computer and with no journey to face afterwards, there is also someone there most evenings for encouragement or contests.

Very similar to any web or real life based group but with more involvement than the former and more comfort than the latter. Virtual writing desk or silly bookworm hat anyone?

Virtual Writers has a SL forum area http://forum.virtualwritersinc.com/viewforum.php?f=80 and you’ll find me in SL as Judi Newall

I feel compelled to pop up and mention that I am starting a saner alternative to NaNo because you’re absolutely right that this schedule doesn’t work for most people. A Round of Words in 80 Days is designed to be the writing challenge that recognizes that you have a life. We’re starting January 3rd. Pop over and join us!

http://aroundofwordsin80days.wordpress.com

I finished Nano yesterday, with the end hitting at around 50,500 words. The draft is a total “vomit draft” (I picked that term up from the Creative Screenwriting Podcast), that is full of notes to myself about horrible word choice, bad description and lots and LOTS of “go back and insert a scene that does X so this scene makes a lick of sense.”

It was fun, and since I was just writing RPG fanfic, I was able to keep my inner editor and inner salesman quiet while I just wrote the darn thing. I am thinking of this as a warm up exercise for writing a real “try to sell the beast” novel in the coming year.

Yesterday I broke 50,000, but I still have 6+ chapters to go — and I’ve been publishing online as I go, so the work goes on. Yes, it’s a horrendously pulpy fantasy (that doesn’t actually feature any magic WHATsoever — call it backlash against current trends) but I’m having fun.

Also I’ve been noveling with a guy who makes me smile when I think about him. I wouldn’t have that if I hadn’t done NaNo this year.

@Kait –

Oooh, I’ll look at that. A more practical timeframe makes sense.

– c.

@Rick –

For what RPG?

– c.

This was my first stab at NaNoWriMo and I ended up with 20022 words. I actually quit writing mid-sentence but I’m not going to go back in and finish it because that would mess up my word count and I like the number 20022.

I sort of ditched the 50K words in 30 days thing and made up my own goals. I figured that way, even if I lose I can still win. What I didn’t consider was that I might not meet my own goals either which pretty much makes me a double loser. But I’m content with that.

One of my goals was to see if I could even write fiction. I can do non-fiction, essays, stream of consciousness type stuff but I’ve never attempted fiction. And I should probably never attempt it again. Never in my life have I invested so much time in creating something so heinous. I started getting bored with the story at about 10K words but I did pick up on a little literary trick that helped me with that. Every time the story got boring, someone had to have sex. That got me through the last 10K words.

My other goal was to see if I could write consistently. I knew 1667 words per day was out of the question but I had hoped that I could make myself write at least a paragraph a day. Yeah, failed there too. Although, technically I probably did write more consistently than ever before because in my attempt to avoid writing my novel, I cranked out some fabulous status updates and blog posts.

Will I finish my novel, edit it, and attempt to have it published. Yes I will. Just as soon as polka dotted pigs fly out of my butt.

Holy sweet Jesus, I made it. Almost 30,000 words since midnight. I still sort of hate myself for procrastinating so much, but I made it.

Decided to answer this all structured-like for the ease of my brain-meats.

1) What I’m asking is: how’d it go? What were your experiences? What caused you the greatest difficulties, and what part of the novel-writing process was far simpler than you expected?

As far as I’m concerned, it went swimmingly! Turns out it’s easier to sit and write, consistently, day in and day out when you don’t edit as you go… Yes, old tried and true advice, but like so much in life I had to learn that one for myself. Bumping ‘wordcount’ up in the priority list helped with that a great deal. On the flip side, it was hard to lock up my inner editor. He wanted to go back, change that scene from before that I knew wouldn’t make sense any more after what I’d just written. Finding and connecting with a bunch of fellow writers in my city was also a wonderful experience, confirming once again that all us creative types are some sort of crazy. Finding an ex’s ex there was a bit odd, however.

2) Have you done NaNoWriMo before? Did you complete it then? What happened to that book?

This was my very first time ever. I’d heard the buzz on Twitter for a while, but didn’t find and join the official site until about three days in and thought, what the hell. I’ve got a novel that want’s finishing, I’ll do that here!

3) Would you do it again? Do you aspire to be a writer, or was this just for proverbial shits and giggles? (And yes, those are from a proverb. Something about a donkey, a king, and a basket of shits and giggles. Shut up.)

Absolutely I would, and yes, I do aspire to be a writer. I see NaNo as a tool, mainly. Something to kick my ass into gear on a project I already have in the works and what-not. I also love the social aspect. There’s something strangely awesome about taking over the back room of a Denny’s and writing with a bunch of other writers. And while there is a lot of socialising going on, there’s also a lot of writing, sometimes more than I might have done on my own.

4) Did you complete your story at 50,000 words, or are you still marching toward the true and actual end of the book? In what genre do you consider your story to belong?

I actually ‘completed’ my story at around 36k, then committed the ultimate sin: editing during NaNo. Since I rushed a few scenes, glossed over some descriptions, came up with ideas for additional scenes after I was well past where they ought to go, this editing is still adding to my wordcount. Of course, just because I didn’t ‘win’ at NaNoWriMo doesn’t mean that I didn’t reach my goal to finish the first draft of my manuscript. The genre is definitely fantasy, though it got more contemporary-political than I’d intended. Oh well. (Don’t trust the Angels.)

5) Do you do it for the community? Do you enjoy the social media surrounding the experience? Or do you operate in relative isolation?

Yeah, a lot of it was about the community for me, though more so the in-person, RL interactions than anything else. I usually lurk in forums, and I find it hard to keep up with the pace in chatrooms. That said, I would usually vomit something out onto Twitter.

I started. I got to 33k words before Thanksgiving arrived and ruined everything. My entire week was gobbled up by family visits and birthday parties. With finals coming up in a week, I have spent all my free time writing tests and review guides. The only parts of my NaNo that I like are the drunken debauchery and the action scenes, which don’t constitute much of the novel.

As for the experience, I went outside genre and wish I hadn’t. Most of the time I was writing, I would rather have been working on one of my other two wips or editting the mss I have complete. What I have written, I will finish, but I doubt I will do anything further with it. Once Christmas break rolls around, I will be back on the projects that I love.

I don’t know if I will do it again. Fast-paced seems to produce more than average amounts of crap, in my case.

HECK YEAH I made it! My first NaNo is 50,002 words . .

The hardest part for me was thinking sequentially, in order . . skimming through my completed NaNo I see it’s wildly out of sequence.

The easiest parts were the first and last paragraphs- I wrote those first (the story sort of ends where it starts).

I don’t know yet whether I’ll do it again next year . . leaning yes, unless I get insanely busy, which is doubtful.

My overriding goal in successfully completing the 50,000+ words for NANo was to prevent the end of the universe, so I’m pretty proud of myself.

Genre- not too great at compartmentalizing my writing. My best guess is it’s a plausible futuristic satire.

I enjoyed the social media surrounding NaNo in a few bits and pieces. I didn’t do the daily word count or write-ins and such. I like to work alone without constantly giving updates to others.

Now I can already feel my NaNo burning hole in my pocket. Cripes.

I still haven’t “won” but if I glue together the three open documents, I probably will.
I keep trying this because it sounds like a good idea, a bold experiment, a new year’s resolution to sit down and write more, a community-building blah blah blah.

Except, I’m apparently not that friendly. I like being locked up in my little room, though I’ve discovered if I drag around the school’s mac I can get more done since people won’t let me stay in my cave full time. I have no NaNo “writing buddies.” I never did any of those weird pajamas at the library sort of write ins. (The homeless people are there to sleep not listen to me click away and talk to myself). I went for days on end without bothering to update the counter.

I can’t write foolishness and not want to do at least some editing along the way. I can’t keep writing useless scenes that have no home. But I can’t follow an outline unless I’m taking a time test answering inane questions about my favorite cupcake or philosophy major. I have to stop and think along the way. I also have to buy groceries and cook food because starving to death in the interest of typing asshat over and over seems like the wrong way to go.

I did write more flash and short fiction, which I consider to be a win, even if NaNo doesn’t.

I wrote 105k of crap. Well, okay, there’s probably about 20k in there that is salvageable, but, mostly crap. It was my second NaNo, last year went so much better. I wrote 66k during November, finished the book at 110k in December, and actually have something more or less readable. No, I didn’t ‘do’ anything with it. One day, perhaps?

This year, I’m going to revise. Actually, completely rewrite, and that’s just to get a coherent first draft. I might get a novella out of it, I reckon.

@Brian –

You wrote… 30,000 words… today?

I’m not trying to harsh your buzz, but are any of those words usable?

I write… 1000 words an hour or so. Assuming I wrote for 24 hours straight, I’d have 24,000 hours. By hour ten I’d probably be writing raw gibberish. By hour twenty I’d probably be painting with my feces.

And that’s still not 30,000 words.

I mean, wow.

– c.

Man, this year…

This was my fifth NaNo, and my fifth win.

This book sucks donkey balls. I was fretting over the other book (the one that launches tomorrow, whoo!) and had a week here and a week there where I touched this novel not at all. Add to that switching stories mid-month…yeesh.

I have random liek woah. Mid-scene POV changes, crazy conversations, and drop-of-a-hat fights. At one point I was slashing two imaginary people. (okay, not exactly. But they do not have bodies, and yet I wrote them getting laid. My shame, it is abundant.)

But I did it. I got 50K, and I got a lot of figuring-out done on a story I’d thought dead, as I hadn’t touched it in maybe fifteen years. I’ll probably drop it now because I have other deadlines, but at least now I’ve made a start on salvaging it.

Of the other four? Two have been through major revisions, and need another round. Two are pretty much untouched. All of them are awesome, far awesomer than this one. As someone above said, having to wait to start means I do more research and planning than I would normally, so I fly through my zero drafts in NaNo (usually) and come out with a good story ready to be turned into something great.

I’ll be following your editing posts closely. ^__^

Only made 36,000 words, but I consider this NaNoWriMo a resounding success. This is the first time i’ve written anything of considerable length and stuck with it for a considerable amount of time. Mostly because I’m a procrastinator, but I’m also young (I can drive, but not buy tobacco) and I think it really helped me as a writer. I look forward to next year and to hopefully finishing my novel.

Yay, writing.

Did I make the word count? Yes: 50016, because I got to 50000 and decided to add another sentance, just to be sure. Took me twenty nine of the thirty days on account of RL suckage – I moved across a rather large continent and got a job. Which isn’t really ‘suckage’, except in the context of trying to write.

Also, it took me so long because there were many points where I had to force myself to write. There were multiple occasions where I had to rip the words out of my head, and towards the end, I had abandoned all pretext of structure and was just making shit up as I went, in any order it came to me, rather than trying for some semblance of a sequence.

I ‘won’ last year too, though last year I was unemployed and actually finished all 50000 more than a week before the end – at which point I got bored and did something else for a while. I was practically skipping through the word-count meadows. I had an outline that got abandoned about four chapters in. *That* lovely piece of bollocks is in the midst of its third rewrite and still not really ready for public consumption.

I think last year’s went better than this year’s because I *did* edit it as I went. I’d write a chapter, print it out, and attack the living shit out of it with my editing pencil. I got quite a lot of extra words that way, not to mention, shored up a few gaping plot holes and found places where it would benefit from expansion and others that stuck out like a goiter on an anorexic and would later need to be excised.

This time around, I didn’t really have the ability to print and edit chunks at a time, and my overall sense of the story definitely suffered for it. 50000 + words in and I still haven’t figured out what the main villan’s motivation is (if ever there were a time for the Picard Face-palm, now would be it).

I do, however, have a much better idea of what needs more research, have added characters I hadn’t even planned for, and have a story that would probably make more sense as two books rather than one, when I finally get around to finishing/editing it. So it wasn’t a total loss.

As for whether or not I aspire to be a writer…I think yes, on some levels. I have the ideas, and I find the written word to be far more expressive than any other form of art. I certainly possess many of the (apparently) necessary character traits (hermit-like behaviour, over-dependancy on caffinated beverages and all that), but comparitively speaking, I’m a dabbler. I will always write, and love it, but my sister has much more drive and dedication to become a professional than I.

You know those family reunions where you see all your grandmother’s relatives who you’ve never known and the whole weekend is just really awkward but at the end of it you can’t say anything bad about it because you fulfilled you’re familial obligation? That’s how NaNo was. I “won” and winning never felt so…mediocre. The greatest difficulty was sticking to this whole “don’t edit, just write” nonsense. The simple part? Writing 50k words. It turns out writing badly is incredibly easy.

This was my first time participating and I have a strong feeling it will be my last. I am serious about writing and I normally write around 2,000-3,000 words a day on my own personal projects.

My story is not complete. It is word soup. There is an opening paragraph and last paragraph and a bunch of who-knows-what going on in the middle. There are massive amounts of material that need to be cut and gaping plot holes that need to be filled in. I wrote this particular story because it has been running around in my head in little snapshots for a long time and I wanted to get it out. I’m going to let this one sit for awhile and when I’m feeling a little masochistic one day I’ll pull it out.

I thought the community would be fun, but it turns out I didn’t really do much interacting. It was fun seeing what everyone else was experiencing, but in general I kept to myself.

I wrote a whole blog post about my NaNo experience here: http://caethesfaron.com/nanowrimo-wrap-up-the-good-the-bad-the-ugly

I finished a day early. Most of my writing buddies did as well. I’ve participated several times in the past, but this time around I learned a couple things…

One, that the whole “community spirit” of writing that Nanowrimo’s supposed to embrace is kind of nonsense. The website itself sucks on toast for anything except bleating into the darkness about your plot problems, or sifting through a bunch of would-be pedagogues trying to tell all of Nanowrimo How It Is in the Writing World. There’s no escaping the fundamental truth that most of the time, it will be just you and the keyboard, alone.

I also learned how entertaining it is to set up really juicy scenes and sequels. Why wasn’t I doing this the whole time? It’s awesome.

Love your blog.

It was my first Nano and yes, I won. I’m the kind of person who, if dared to start jogging, would sign up for a marathon and then do it. I’m that stupid. I was challenged to do the Nano by a few people in my social pantheon— who all proceeded to drop out within a few weeks, leaving me all by my lonesome, writing away. However, like with the proverbial marathon for the novice jogger, I wrote my novella and clocked in at 50,028 according to the Nano word counter and 50,028 according to my Pages word counter.

It wasn’t as bad as I had feared.

I’m not a fiction writer. At all. I’m a chronic diarist/blogger/non-fiction type. I also have very a very short attention span. I have a very linear mind and find convoluted plots exhausting and confusing. I’m crappy at characterization, so I wrote about monsters, goats and cats.

However, as I noted above, it wasn’t as bad as I had feared. I just wrote a lot at lunch time and on weekends. I was sick for the first half and fell behind by 5k words but caught up on one train trip out of town for work (amazing what a 90 minute train ride can do for one’s creative zeal). I never lost sleep over it and my caffeine consumption did not increase. I didn’t feel stressed, though I probably should have as I’d signed up at the last minute without even a concept or clue let alone plot or outline prepared. Everything came out of my backside, as it were, from day one.

And it isn’t awful. That’s the cool thing. I’m used to writing regularly on my blog so writing on its own doesn’t cause me stress and I can write fairly well for long chunks of time. I enjoy it and always have. I’m so happy it isn’t as awful as I had feared.

(Side note: longer discussion about the whole she-bang can be found here, where I usually write: http://www.ephemeraanddetritus.com/2010/12/02/after-nanowrimo-passes-inertia-sets-in/)

It was my third NaNo – failed the first one (well, I was fifteen, so no shame there), won my second (senior year of high school), and won this one (first year of university)!

Last year was more of a “shits and giggles” affair, started out with a single character and I spent the first 10K following her around, waiting for her to do something. And somehow, at 11K, she did do something. And somehow, a plot did develop out of that – while it’s never something I’d consider polishing for publication, I was pleased with how I ended up with something that could, if you stretched your imagination and tilted your head sideways, could be viewed as “a novel”.

More importantly, it was fun. Like, a shitton of fun.

So this year, I thought I’d be clever and have a plan. Had an idea for a trilogy floating about in my brain for years now, so spent September and October planning out how the first book in that thing would look.

That was my mistake.

At the end of November now, I’ve got a 56,000 story that looks nothing like what I wanted. My main character turned into a wimp, my narrator became a bit of a bitch, my plot derailed somewhere around 30,000 words and I was dragged along screaming for the ride.

Thing is, though? It was still fun as hell.

Not looking forward to the steaming dog-mess of editing work I’ve got to do on this thing, but at least it’s written, and I guess that’s good enough for now.