Alright, I did it! I spent countless hours (58.75) writing too many words to keep track of (54,259) and saving the world with my writing (actually, I kinda destroyed it) and after lots of days (30) I’m actually a NaNoWriMo 2017 Winner (of some fancy computer icon badges and a PDF certificate)! But it’s not about awards and stats, of course, it’s about setting a goal that you would like to achieve and finding a way to accomplish it.
I have to be honest, I didn’t think I could do it. Like everyone else on this planet I have a mix of reality and fantasy that are always at odds with each other. My family and my day job are constantly getting in the way of my writing the perfect novel. My grammar is kinda sorta sometime not so great really. Speling? Well, luckily there’s an app for that. Also, I flip through ideas like an ADHD poster-child on pixie stix. So if I was being real with myself, I should have known the odds were against me.
That’s why NaNoWriMo works (for me, at least this one time)! It is built with the concept in mind that if you have too much time (60 days, 90 days?) you’ll probably lose interest. It throws in charts and graphs for you to see your progress which helps remind you that every word counts. It gamifies your progress with badges and icons (super busy on day 30, but hey, I wrote 29 days in a row and there’s no way I was going to miss out on that extra badge – bam – 320 extra words towards my story and I earn the “wrote 30 days in a row” badge). It also encourages you to be social and leave your den once in awhile by participating in write-ins and connecting with “buddies”.
Now what? I don’t actually have a finished novel. I do have a beginning, middle and even an end but some of the chapters in between are sorta dicey and of course I have to go fill in all the [do research and put info here for number of llamas killed by falling drones every year]. But the cup is more than half full and it’s inspiring to see pages and pages of words coalescing around an idea that popped out of your skull like Athena heading off to battle.
Alright, stop reading this. I’m off to finish my novel.