CornerScribe

NaNo Postmortem

Well, I didn’t make 50,00 words this year, and surprisingly, I’m not really upset about it.

For one thing, I’ve got a pretty decent novel underway. I’m happy with it, all 30k or so words. Here’s my take on how things went and what worked (and what didn’t).

1. I went back and did some serious rewriting about a week in. That lost me two or three days and about six thousand words. However, it also made the novel a lot better.
2. I re-read the previous day’s work and did some minor edits along the way. It helped me get back in the “flow,” but overall, it was probably a waste of time.
3. I just didn’t spend as much time this year writing. I missed a few days entirely, and with a goal of almost two thousand words a day, you can fall behind very quickly.
4. I followed an outline, for about a week. Then, I realized there were problems and re-worked the whole thing. I’ve done the first 30,000 without an outline, but now I’m finding that I need one.

I do have something else going on that’s taking a lot of my time and attention, so I’ve been lax on writing and blogging. I’m not quite ready to talk about what’s going on, but maybe soon!

I should be back to a normal posting schedule now. So, please stick around. I have some interesting posts and changes to the site scheduled for December.