Nanowrimo Accomplished!

I’ve never taken quite this long to write my “Monday” blog post. But here I am, hello!

This week I wrapped up Nanowrimo, which means that I wrote 50,000 words this month. And, I even finished early, on Tuesday. I have absolutely never written this much in so short of a period of time. My comfort zone is spending maybe one day a week writing a 1,500 word short story, and honestly, it’s always been difficult for me to keep up with a writing regimen any more taxing than that.

So I’m really proud of myself. Like, crazy proud of myself. I added 43,000 words to my novel and wrote about 7,000 in character bios. Which, added to the 46,000 words I already have, means I officially have nearly 90,000 words on my novel. That feels really, really close to the right length of the thing. And I’m so excited for the next steps.

I’m going to use my winnings code and purchase Scrivener, I think. And then I’m going to spend a lot of time organizing this thing. I ended up writing all over the place during November. Nothing is in order and I don’t even know if it’s truly broken up in chapters. But it’s all there, a full plot from beginning to end, albeit in need of quite a bit of editing.

I’m really proud of myself, and I seriously am looking forward to doing all of the editing and rearranging. I cannot wait until it’s done and I’m sending it out in proposals to agents. I truly cannot wait.

Except I can. I’ve been taking a break from writing since I finished, and I’m going to go ahead and keep doing that until next Monday. I think that writing breaks are important, in contrast to the typical “write every day” advice. I know that I personally need them. I’m not going to take six months again to get back to my novel, but I need about a week of space.

I’m so in awe of everyone who wrote 50,000 words this month! And I’m just in awe of those who wrote a little bit less, because writing is hard, making things is hard, and the word count isn’t as important as the fact that the words are coming out.

Congrats to everyone who participated in Nanowrimo!

Thanks for stopping by.