NaNo Days 18 to 27: From lagger to winner

I did it! 50,000 NaNo words are done! I am an official NaNoWriMo 2020 winner!

If my last blogpost was the last thing you heard about my NaNo'ing, you're probably not surprised, but the final week really was a lot harder than it should have been. I'll leave my daily word count graph here to illustrate:

See that massive drop after day 21? That's what we call writer's fatigue. Not writer's block, I had a firm idea of where this story was going, but I was just tired of writing it all down. This crash coincided with me coming home from the November trip I take each year and plunging into a big pile of work stuff and home stuff and social stuff that was waiting for me. My brain just couldn't be bothered to also add NaNo'ing to the list. So after a day (23) of not writing anything at all, I pulled myself together and decided on at least 1,000 words a day. The bare minimum, which some days took me an hour and a half. But I stuck in there, and still managed to finish three days ahead of par.

Now my story is far from finished. That may actually be one of the issues; I'd actually plotted out the story this year, using my fancy whiteboard and magnets and everything. The whole book consists of twelve chapters in total, but since each chapter was going to be around 8,000 to 10,000 words, I would probably only make it halfway through. Which would be fine, of course, the goal here is to write 50,000 words, not to write an entire novel. But all the little bits and pieces I'd already written down in flashes of inspiration only went into those first six chapters. Those were the ones I'd thought out in detail; the rest are still rough sketches. And around day 23, I was at the end of chapter six. Not that all chapters were completely finished, there are some bits where I put what needed to be written between brackets [like so] and then went off and wrote the next bit that came after. So I came to my endpoint a bit quicker than expected; 5,000 words quicker, to be exact. And writing a whole new piece, a bit you haven't actually thought that much about, a bit you thought you might not write until maybe November 2021, that is hard going. I got there, in the end, but I'm pretty sure the last 5,000 words wouldn't make the cut in an editing round.

Doesn't matter; I finished. And I still like most of my story. I like my characters, I like my story arch, I like where everything is going. Some bits I was truly inspired, writing as fast as I could to get all the ideas and sentences that were flowing from my head on the paper. Of course, there are some bits I don't like, but the overall feeling is pretty positive. But I am done with it now; I won't be doing any more writing for the rest of this year (except for blog posts of course!). A couple of weeks ago I thought the positive writing vibe would carry me onwards, but I know see that I need some time to recuperate and start collecting those little inspirational snippets again, to one day braid into the story again. So we'll see again next year!