NaNoWriMo 2016, Full Recap

Posted 01 Dec 2016 drafting

• Complete my first draft of the sequel to Flotsam - Check!
• Estimated word count goal: 100,000 - Not Quite, but done is better than lengthy! Flotsam was about 78K when I finished the initial draft in June, and it plumped up nicely in the oven.
• Don't lose my sanity - Opinions Needed(?)
• Have tons of write-ins for all the WriMos in my region - Not too bad! I've gotten feedback we need more in a certain area of the county, but I expected to make adjustments. I want to have more write-ins in other areas throughout the year to see if I can build up a group of regulars who can attract more WriMos each November.

• Hit 50K words on November 13!
• Completed my draft on November 25!
• Fussed with the draft a bit more to total it at 88,003 words!
• Continued adding words (not an impressive amount, but words..!) to total 88,607 for the whole month!

• We started the month with almost a straight week of house guests, so there was much visiting, rides to the airport, and other plans out and about.
• Halloween is a major holiday around these parts, and it's very important to me that the beginning of NaNoWriMo not overshadow it. I'm not sure I totally succeeded this year. I'm thinking for 2017 I ought not to start NaNo with so much pomp and circumstance. Maybe hold the kick-off party for the group an extra weekend ahead?
• Thanksgiving (which brought another almost solid week of house guests) was a more bustle-y day than usual. I spent 12 hours cooking and only managed to steal 50 minutes that day for writing, in contrast to previous years' Thanksgiving dinners. But I will say I totally nailed dinner this year. Everything came out of the oven at just the right time to still be warm when it went on the table!
• The first snow of the season tried to hamper one of my write-ins, but luckily the ground was still warm enough to melt it from below.
• Illness hit me after the holiday was over, I think as the result of too much stress and not enough sleep, and not quite sticking to my usual dietary behaviors (I was still LCHF, as I have been since Feb 2015, but I ate a lot of faux keto recipes and had a LOT more dairy than usual).
• General fatigue and stress over managing write-ins and people's expectations.
• Let's not forget the world-flipping election results. Oof!

• Consistency is the thing. NaNoWriMo didn't teach me that. I got that earlier this year from my Asimov Hour practice. Asimov Hour accounted for 24.25 hours of my writing this month, worth 46,469 words. I skipped a couple AH sessions, and others were a bit on the short side. That suggests that (for the 50K word goal), a consistent morning schedule without interruption would have been enough to "win" the month's event. Mind you, 50K and finished draft aren't the same thing.
• Normally I have trouble sitting down to write if I don't have a full hour I can dedicate to the session, but 300-600 words at a time, I used a chunk of my lunch hour most weekdays to add to my word count.
• Having my outline prepared before November (another NaNoWriMo first) made it easy to know what to write next. Ironically I feel like having Gold Five repeating "Stay on Target" in my head might have squashed my narrative voice a little, but I still have a full draft I can work with.
• Never mind the struggles listed above. I kept writing. It was the only thing I had control over, and I exercised the shit outta that control.

• For the first year in my NaNo experience, I stayed ABOVE the goal track line on my word bar straight through the end of finishing my draft!
• By avoiding backspacing and re-reading over previous sections, I more-than-doubled my output! My best session clocked at 3,000+ WPH!
• I could have taken the last five days of the month off if I so chose! (I didn't so choose, I wanted that 30-day badge for updating my NaNoWriMo word count on the event's website.)
• The little moments I stole from my lunch and a couple of evenings to write were worth 17,225 words (almost 20% of my final word count). I wouldn't have thought they'd add up like that. If I needed proof (and to a degree, I did) that writing for 15, 30, or 45 minutes is worth it: *mic drop.*

• 8 Writing Events, 24.75 hours total, worth 24,913 words. Shows me that even though there were a LOT of writing events, just attending events, would not have netted me an event "win." I'm not sure it would have been practical to attend any more events (there were as many in my region that I set up or coordinated as events that I did attend - I'm at least pretty proud of that!)
• I frequently set up writing sprints on NaNoWriMo's new site tool: Group Word Sprints. I posted to the group's facebook page to invite others to join me, and used the mini deadlines to re-focus myself if my attention started to wane.
• Despite having to write lots of words that I didn't count toward my word goal (my ML newsletters and these weekly blog posts), being an ML only seemed to bolster my resolve and make me want to 'be a good role model,' instead of sapping energy and willpower as I half-feared.
• I do need to re-evaluate the locations of our writing events for next year. Attendance at one location was dismal. Other folks still felt as though there was nothing near them. I'm wondering if holding quarterly write-ins at each corner of the region will get people thinking of writing year-round and maybe be less hermit-crabby come next November.

• Re-read the draft (I'm just under 70% of the way through at the time of writing this)
• Review the draft with my developmental editor
• Take the draft through its paces and begin my re-write!