The grand total was 51,891 words.
That’s right! Third time winner, right here!!
This was my second best year in terms of word count. My record was in 2014 with 52,119 words. And, yeah, I was only 228 words from surpassing that record, but whatever. I had finished writing a scene and didn’t want to start a new one. Plus, I didn’t want to write almost 2,000 words on that last day because then it would screw with my monthly average. Especially since I technically hit the 50k mark on the 29th.
But look at how pretty this bar graph is! (No one can say that I'm not a consistent writer.)
I ended up writing a total of six stories this year, which was the same as last year. I didn’t even plan that.
Looking back, Story 1 was a poorly written short story. It was so dialogue heavy (but the concept still interests me). But, hey, it was a good warm-up. When I started writing Story 3, I thought that it would carry me for a majority of the month. Turns out, I only spent five days writing it and then hit a brick wall with it. So I moved on.
On November 9, I had already written five stories (or the beginnings of stories) and I had no idea what to write. So in a fit of panic, I reached for the top book on my pile (see my October blog post for the book tower) and opened it to page 49. I took the first full sentence on that page and it became the very first line of my next story.
I was totally making things up on the spot, but somehow, by the end of the week, I was beginning to see the entire story arc. Eventually, I wrote two charts by hand to organize my ideas. It really didn’t surprise me that I worked on this story all the way up to the end of NaNo.
But guys, despite me winning, this year was tough for me to make time for writing. I had a workshop class, a literary magazine class, and an internship. I already had to do a ton of reading and writing, which is all time consuming. Writing for NaNoWriMo took sometime between 2-2.5 hours daily. During that first week, I think I regularly only got 3-4 hours of sleep because I was trying to cram everything that I needed to get done in a day. My new bedtime is now 4am (which, unfortunately, has stuck since the beginning of November). Luckily, I can sleep in. My whole sleep schedule is terrible, basically.
So when December 1st rolled around, I was relieved. Mainly because I could then concentrate on my final projects for school.
But at least I have something to show for my sleepless nights…
^I feel like I say this every year, but I'm sorry for how grainy the photo is. My webcam is the only thing that can take such a wide shot of myself without having to physically get someone to take a picture.
P.S. Also, as of December 8th, I am officially finished with school! And I don’t mean that I’m finished with the semester (which is true), but I’m done with my second degree. I won’t be attending the graduation ceremony (once was enough), but all I need now is for my actual degree to arrive in the mail.
And a job. I’ll be continuing my internship for another 3-4 months come January (which I’m excited to read more submissions), so I guess that’s something to hold me over in the meantime...
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