It’s been a full month since I’ve posted on my blog. NaNo took a lot out of me, and as soon as NaNo finished, I got hit with my Etsy Christmas orders. I’m pretty caught up on Etsy orders at the moment, so I figured I’d take some time to debrief!
Nano was tough this year because I got hit by two colds, one right after the other. It wasn’t until about halfway through the month that I actually started cranking out the words. You can check out my progress on the bar graph below. I’m actually going to break this into two posts since it’ll get a bit long otherwise.
What did you learn this year? I think the biggest takeaway this year was learning to skip the details and get the plot down first. My stories are propelled by the characters, so the way they interact with each other moves things along, so getting dialogue down has been the focus during this year’s NaNo. I skipped details to the point of not even giving characters real names. Of course, that means cities, businesses, ships, etc also got no names. This should make editing interesting…
How far did you get? I managed to get to the final act of the story. I have one big battle/raid to write, then the final battle/conclusion. I know where everything is going, I just need to sit down and power through the last part of the first draft before moving on. I hit 50k, but there’s another 10k+ to write. But that’s just the first step. After first draft, there are many more steps.
What’s the point? What did you win? There is no prize for winning. It’s not a competition, it’s a personal challenge. If you manage to complete 50k in one month, you get a neat downloadable winner certificate, but that’s about it. The real prize is having 50k words of a novel finished!
