How many times have you won Nanowrimo?

I’ve only won once. And it was with the first 82k or so words of Haunt of the Wilds.

I was actually supposed to be working on a different novel and Haunt was just going to be a quick practice to get the rust out of my brain. And then I just…kept going. No biggie.

It was also rather helpful to have my partner suspended for that month (tongue in cheek–it was a very stressful month) because it meant that I got a huge amount of time every day to write.

Every other year that I’ve attempted to write 50k in a month, I haven’t made it. I’m pretty sure a bunch of the reason is because of not having all that extra time to write. But also, I’m rarely excited going into November to work on something. I’m usually in the muddy middle, so really I’m just operating at writing as usual, same old habits, getting my typical amount done as I do every other month while I’m knee-deep in a project.

If I finish a project during November, that adds another sticking point, for it’s difficult to immediately jump from one project to the next (at least for me) without some form of reset. The beginning might be slow. I’m probably still heavily thinking about my last story instead of my new story. I may have a few things that have fallen by the wayside that need to be caught up on.

There’s also the possibility of interruption during the month and interruption is the key killer of motivation and advancement.

Either way, winning Nano isn’t the end goal for me. It’s about making sure I’m keeping up my habits and hopefully tweaking them to be better habits.

If you are doing Nanowrimo this year or are working on some other large project, I wish you all the luck and organization to keep yourself focused and moving forward on it!

And if you fail, you will be far further than you were, and that is a success in and of itself :)

~Emmi