And what an interesting NaNoWriMo it was this year. First off, the website underwent some heavy changes a couple months prior, but I hadn’t really logged in until October 30. I had to get myself acquainted with everything, and some features weren’t working the way it should have been. Unlike some users, I luckily didn’t have a problem with uploading my daily word count. I did, however, have some issues with the “recording of time.” I thought it was a cool feature – since I already time myself on how long it takes for me to write – but I felt like it was not showcasing the proper time periods on my stats. Good thing I still input this data into my own document. They also did away with the validation this year due to the program not working in their favor. It meant I didn’t have to spend time on November 30 copying and pasting my entire NaNo, but it also meant people could lie and say that they hit the 50k mark and earned their prizes without actually “winning.”
I wrote every day during the month of November. I had set out with the goal of writing at least 1700 words/day, but sometime around a third of the way in, I decided it was too easy. So I kicked it up to at least 1800 words/day. Not sure why I do this to myself, but it really shouldn’t surprise me anymore. (It’s definitely not the first time I’ve bumped my word count on writing projects, but I don’t think I’ve ever had the threshold be so high for a daily count.) I probably spent 5-6 days writing just after midnight so I didn’t have to write so much later in the day.
In the end, is it really surprising that I won for the sixth year in a row?
I won with a total of 55,443 words. Which meant I had beaten last year’s record by 2,382 words. I finished NaNo on Thanksgiving, so that was cool, but I still wrote during the last two days of November. My average daily word count was 1848.1 words. The average time was 1 hour, 40.2 mins. What’s interesting is that I also beat last year’s speed by 6 mins.
^Can you tell when I made the switch to 1800 words?
I wrote 13 stories during the course of NaNoWriMo. My genres were all over the place. Maybe it was because the music I was listening to was all over the place as well? I wrote completely in third-person past-tense, so at least I was consistent in that?
The longest story that I worked on lasted me for 11 days. I had started it on a Saturday, and I needed to be somewhere that evening. I figured I wasn’t going to have much time to write once I eventually returned home, so I had to quickly come up with an idea to write a few hundred words. I leaned into my preferred genre and began writing something. Had no idea where it was going to go, but at least there was some sort of easy conflict set up in the beginning. And as I began to spend time with the characters and setting, I started to learn a bit about them and the story. Two short “chapters” in the beginning were basically exposition, but it helped with my world building. After all, I could always delete these paragraphs later if I ever wanted to polish it up. Halfway through the story, as I was rereading my work, I discovered that I was writing it in the direct and no-nonsense voice of the protagonist. I hadn’t planned on doing that – I was writing it in third-person, after all – but her personality had crept into the words. All I know is that I went very far with this idea I had spontaneously created simply because I had to complete my daily word count.
I only spent one day working on a story idea that I had previously thought of back in September. All the other stories were either derived from writing prompts or something I had made up on the spot. Not going to lie, there were a few days in November where I would stare at the clock as it ticked away toward midnight and I willed myself to think of some sort of plot idea because I had nothing. Those were always frustrating.
In the end, I’m quite proud of my new record. Of course, this also means I’ve only set the bar even higher for next year. But I’ll worry about that in October/November 2020.
As usual, here’s my annual grainy photo from my webcam with me and my lovely Winner’s Certificate.
P.S. I also managed to write a poem toward the end of November! Second one this year, so that’s probably it for me in 2019. I played around with the form, which I haven’t done with a poem in a while. It spontaneously came to me at 2 a.m., and I quickly wrote it down. The paper looks like complete chicken scratch, lol. Phrases were crossed out and replaced with better words, and I rearranged three stanzas. It definitely looks better typed out.
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