NaNoWriMo 2023
After not doing NaNoWriMo for several years, I came back to it this year. In large part, this was because Jeremy was going to do NaNo this year, and I joined in solidarity with him.
Initially, I set out to write a non-fiction book about how to write a novel. Keeping in mind that I don’t LIKE writing novels, this was a somewhat tongue-in-cheek approach. It was inspired by an interaction I had soon after joining BlueSky, where another author said that books about writing novels never talk about the important stuff, like what to do when your cat won’t let you write and how important naps are to the creative process. So I wrote that book, with additional emphasis on stickers and Little Debbie Oatmeal Cream Pies (which Torrey wanted me to include).
When I started writing this book, however, I realized that my estimate of it being a 50,000 word project was way off. I was going to be lucky to cross 30,000.
I had a secondary project, a superhero novella I had outlined late in October. My original plan was that I’d work on it if I had time, after completing my word count on my “official” NaNo project. I was already a NaNo rebel by doing a non-fiction project. What was one more thing tacked on?
Suddenly, it was ESSENTIAL. Because as anticipated, once I got started with the first project and saw that I wasn’t going to be able to hit the word counts I had expected in terms of how much I had to say about some of the BIG topics, I knew I wasn’t getting 8,500 words out of stickers, naps, and Little Debbie Oatmeal Cream Pies (and some other stuff).
So I did some recalculating and figured out how to finish both projects in November.
Which meant that my final word count for the two, on November 30th, was 75,405 words. I NaNo’ed and a half! The non-fiction project clocked in at a little over 33,000 words, and the novella was just over 42,000.
This is, for the record, RIDICULOUS. Writing that many words in a month is not something I really thought was possible. And while, admittedly, probably about half of the words in the non-fiction project were pulled out of old blog posts and massaged slightly, that still means I wrote something like 60,000 NEW words, if not more. That’s about triple what I wrote in my second best month in 2023. (I’ve been tracking all my word count this year, so I know.)
This pace is absolutely not something I’m going to attempt to sustain. I’m going to work on a bunch of short projects in December, and beyond that.
Come January, I’ll start working on revisions to the non-fiction project, and then the novella in February. Both are going to need substantial work. But at least I’ve got full drafts, which is not something I can normally say at the end of NaNo.
So victory is mine, I am a winner, and all that jazz. YAY!
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