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"Mini NaNoWriMo" complete!
Feb. 1st, 2017 11:47 amI met my word goal for the month! I mean, I feel kind of silly saying that, because I only even decided I had a word goal partway through the month, once I had some good momentum going on the story I was/still am writing (The Snow Wolf) and wanted a specific motivation to keep pushing forward and getting more words down.
So I decided my goal was 15,500 words in January, because that’s an average of 500 words per day. And I can now report that by my count I wrote 15,600 words this January. :-)
Now, 500 words per day is tiny – though I don’t think I ever actually wrote 500 words in a day. I wrote 1000+ words lots of days, and then I must have taken at least a week off (because I reached a point in the story where I couldn’t keep writing forward until I figured out some backstory stuff first, and I wanted to discuss some of it with my beta-reading friend but she didn’t have time to meet for a while). And then I got back on track and for the last few days I finally did the thing properly, where I had a goal to meet and thus an approximate word count I needed to hit each day if I wanted to make it.
But even done so haphazardly, the experience was good in that it showed me, okay, doing a NaNoWriMo type thing is possible; it isn’t even that hard (at a technical level) to write 1,667 words a day (or whatever the NaNo average actually comes out to – 1,613?). Of course, the real challenge would come in staying the course, pushing on even on days when the motivation’s not there, etc. – and that’s all stuff I didn’t have to face while doing my dilettante-ish 15,000 words.
But. But. "Mini-NaNo" was meant to be exactly that, a mini version of the real thing, a tiny bit of a taster of what real NaNo might be like (someday!) even though I didn’t have the capacity right now to commit to the real thing, and I feel like that worked. And it kept me writing! Definitely writing more and faster than I would have done otherwise, pushing forward at times when it would have been easy instead to say, eh, I don’t feel like it, maybe tomorrow.
And the best news is that this in combination with the motivation-inducing deadline of![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
rt_morelove has led me to write a whole complex multi-chapter story that wouldn’t exist otherwise! The story’s turning out longer than I expected, too, definitely proper novella length.
It feels so good to have a proper, big writing project to sink my teeth into again.
So I decided my goal was 15,500 words in January, because that’s an average of 500 words per day. And I can now report that by my count I wrote 15,600 words this January. :-)
Now, 500 words per day is tiny – though I don’t think I ever actually wrote 500 words in a day. I wrote 1000+ words lots of days, and then I must have taken at least a week off (because I reached a point in the story where I couldn’t keep writing forward until I figured out some backstory stuff first, and I wanted to discuss some of it with my beta-reading friend but she didn’t have time to meet for a while). And then I got back on track and for the last few days I finally did the thing properly, where I had a goal to meet and thus an approximate word count I needed to hit each day if I wanted to make it.
But even done so haphazardly, the experience was good in that it showed me, okay, doing a NaNoWriMo type thing is possible; it isn’t even that hard (at a technical level) to write 1,667 words a day (or whatever the NaNo average actually comes out to – 1,613?). Of course, the real challenge would come in staying the course, pushing on even on days when the motivation’s not there, etc. – and that’s all stuff I didn’t have to face while doing my dilettante-ish 15,000 words.
But. But. "Mini-NaNo" was meant to be exactly that, a mini version of the real thing, a tiny bit of a taster of what real NaNo might be like (someday!) even though I didn’t have the capacity right now to commit to the real thing, and I feel like that worked. And it kept me writing! Definitely writing more and faster than I would have done otherwise, pushing forward at times when it would have been easy instead to say, eh, I don’t feel like it, maybe tomorrow.
And the best news is that this in combination with the motivation-inducing deadline of
rt_morelove has led me to write a whole complex multi-chapter story that wouldn’t exist otherwise! The story’s turning out longer than I expected, too, definitely proper novella length.It feels so good to have a proper, big writing project to sink my teeth into again.
