“I can’t wait to not be writing this book anymore.” -Me, to my husband yesterday

I spent so much time this month being a good little ML and writing articles about NaNoWriMo that I didn’t actually write a single post about my own personal NaNo journey which is odd. Usually I can’t shut up about how my novel is going and I bombard you with little potato updates all month but I guess it’s a testament to how freaking busy I was that I never had the chance. This month zooooomed by so fast, it’s insane.

If you’ve been watching the little widget at the top of the blog, you know that I passed 50,000 words on Sunday, November 27th. But keeping in mind my firm belief in finishing the novel not just hitting 50k, I still powered through the last four chapters finally finishing the book tonight in our area’s online write-in. Now, my novel is actually MUCH longer than the just shy of 55,000 words I finished the month out with both because I started early and for other reasons I’ll cover in another post so my feelings at the end of this NaNo are mixed.

The actual event itself was great. I have a wonderful area and I can’t stress enough how awesome they are. We had great turn out at events, lots of wonderful people who volunteered to head up events while I was unavailable or out of town, and we have several wonderful library partners who kindly and enthusiastically let us have events there and helped publicize the whole movement. Having such a great group of people to support you and write with is invaluable and they really made this a wonderful experience.

But it is, obviously, a ton of work being an ML for a huge event like this (especially such a large area) and I am completely wiped out. So many days this month I ended up having to rush or stay up late to finish real work because I used up so much of the day doing NaNoWriMo things unrelated to writing my novel. It was all worth it but, at the same time, I’m going to be really glad to get my life back. I’ve had sort of a “Can’t Deal with this Now, Save it for After NaNoWriMo” philosophy about everything so that things have piled up both figurative and literally (my office and desk… I actually have 30 different To Do lists in various states of completion that I need to combine into one tomorrow).

And, at the same time, for all the stress and madness, there is something really sad about the end of NaNoWriMo. Because it’s fun in a weird insane kind of way and there is this total Post-NaNoWriMo Letdown Syndrome once it’s over that I can’t quite explain if you haven’t been there. Add to it the massive thrill of winning and finishing a novel and then the creeping dread as you realize that you’ll have to actually edit that monstrosity sometime in the future. It’s a bit of an emotional roller coaster.

I think that was the single hardest thing about NaNoWriMo for me this year. 2011 was the year of the edits for me, I edited a novel, an ebook, a non-fiction book and four plays and that’s just the big stuff in the last 12 months and it has changed the way I think. I had trouble doing my usual wild writing with literary abandon because my inner editor was stronger than ever before. I spent almost every writing second of 2011 polishing and trimming the fat… I found it suddenly hard to shut that off and just write with the usual first draft freedom I used to have. I could not have finished were it not for Write or Die and I need to write a full review of soon because it was an absolute godsend this year. Was writing with an over-enthusiastic inner editor nipping at my heels harder then writing the whole novel with a dictation program like I did last year? I’m honestly not sure.

Let’s look at my stats from the site:

There was one day I forgot to update until after midnight but, other than that, I was pretty consistent about updating every single day so this is pretty accurate. I wrote an average of 1,816 words a day which is higher than the recommended 1,667 so that’s pretty cool. I think it’s also funny to look at the jump around the 17th when it’s clear I got my second wind. Not gonna lie, just looking at this chart makes me exhausted all over again.

But remember last year’s lament about binge writing? I actually wrote almost every single day this November and didn’t have a single 10k day. It was more of a slow and steady wins the race kind of thing instead of lots of little burst of speed which I think is better in the long run.

As for the book itself, well, we need to discuss that at length so that’s a post for another time. For now, I shall bask in another NaNo well done. I’m not quite done yet… I have to write a pep talk and two more emails for my region and then there’s one more event to run next week but the work load definitely lightens from this point on.

But does the word load lessen? Helped by NaNoWriMo, November was my biggest word count month all year. I’ve written 379,329 words so far this year. My original goal for the year was 500,000 words which would mean an additional 120K to write in December. If I down that to the slightly less insane goal of 400,000 for the year, I have only 20K ish left to write. Either way, as much as I would like to take a long break from writing, it’s not going to happen anytime soon.

So that, my friends, is how NaNoWriMo 2011 went down for me. How about you?