NaNoWriMo wrapped up, of course, on November 30. How’d I do? I wound up with a word count of 48,459. Not the goal of NaNoWriMo, I know. But, it satisfies me that with an outline, and setting aside a few hours a night for writing 5 out of 7 days a week, I can make some tremendous progress towards a novel. Personally, after doing this the second time, I’ve come to agree with these wise words - I’d rather have spent the time writing something worth reading than cranking out 50,000 words worth of crap.
Some of the participants I checked ran way over, some nearing 100,000 words, but when I checked their excerpts, I must say YAWN. Not worth the time. Not one excerpt I read sparked my interested except maybe the one for a piece titled AFTRLYF. To be honest, I only checked people in my region, and maybe, just maybe there’s truth to the 700 monkeys for 700 years, that one of these folks has turned out the works of the master himself, but I’d be hard-pressed to figure out which one it was!
Long and short, with a writing plan, I’ve proven to myself that I can still maintain home life, my full time job, and produce sizable and (hopefully) worthwhile works of fiction in a reasonable amount of time. Oh, and the piece I started is only about half done. I wasn’t in any hurry to meet the NaNoWriMo goal necessarily because it was in no way indicative of the novel I’m writing.