Wednesday, December 1, 2010

And NaNo ends...

Although I was strangely absent, I assure you I was writing - sort of. And when the clock hit midnight, I conceded to defeat with only 4, 555 words to go. That's right, I not only lost, but fell incredibly short of my 10k goal.

So what happened?
Life. And writer's block. And more life.

I know I can't entirely blame my shortcomings on life - although spending nearly two weeks on costumes for Steamcon put a really hard to repair dent on the affair - because nearly the whole 15 days I wasn't writing, I had a terrible case of writer's block.

I should have seen it coming. After all, I had already switched my novel plans once. And all these plot bunnies started cropping up - from old novels half written to new ideas I'd avoided. Steamcon's wonderful panels on Hoodou and Western Prostitution definitely added to it (don't ask, I'm not going to go into it). So I jumped from idea to idea, carefully avoiding the looming issue - I didn't believe or trust my plot.

When I returned, I had to face it. And spent nearly three days trying to figure out a solution without any luck. So I thought about new options - after all I had at least 10 days (3 of which were during my holiday) why not start fresh one last time? Too bad it took another 3 days for me to decide, plot and figure out the characters. So that when I finally began writing I was left with a meager 5 days to catch up from 14k to 50k.

And that's how I ended up writing for my life with 30 minutes to midnight - tired, desperate and with an incredibly sore set of hands. I'd pulled out every trick I could think of (some I'm not even proud of) and despite all that I lost. Actually, I stopped at 45,555 with 5 minutes to spare because it was a nice number and I simply couldn't write any more.

Anywho...I'm not done with my story (far from done in fact), but I hope to continue with NaNoFiMo. And although I didn't win, I can say with pride that I wrote 15k in one day.

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