I’m going to go ahead and join the masses of blogs talking about the “after” of the NaNoWriMo experience. I talked a bit earlier in the month about my progress, after hitting the 50K mark on day 10. Because of that I got this shiny:

Pixel Fairies of Winning!

Unfortunately, though I had big plans for the rest of my November, I fell a bit short of my goals. I DID manage to finish my Nano novel. It ended up just over 71K, and I finished…umm…around the 22nd or so? Maybe? I can’t remember for sure. I did some half-hearted editing, and then I got sick. And then I had to clean for company. And then Thanksgiving. All told, I didn’t write for over a week. Like, at all.

Oops.

One of my main goals had been to just WRITE EVERY DAY. (I always wanted to WED, I just had the meaning wrong before ;)) Well, in that, I failed. I wanted to finish my other WIP. Fail. I wanted to be ready to do some major edits come December 1. Mega fail. Right now all I want to do is sleep for a month or so.

But, guess what. It’s okay. It’s fine that I only made it to a couple of my goals, because I was aiming super high. And I knew after I finished that novel in three weeks that I would write crap if I just forced it out. There is a time to force yourself to write, and there is a time to know when it’s okay to take a break. The last week was that time to break for me.

I opened up my novel last night for the first time since finishing. I started reading through, and you know what? It’s not terrible! It’s not the next great American novel, but it’s actually coherent (so far).

I wrote an entire novel in 3 weeks. That’s nothing to sniff at. Did some people write more? Yes. Did some people write less? Yes. Is any accomplishment too big or too small to celebrate? Absolutely not!

So there ya go. Another Nano down. If nothing else, I love Nano for getting a whole bunch of people to come together for a common purpose for at least one month out of the year.

Next up: REVISING REVISING REVISING