Nano Musings

“How did Nanowrimo go?” You ask with a smile, smile which could be seen as friendly but seems somehow mocking.

“Not good,” I reply, “not good at all.”

Yes, this year’s nanowrimo can be considered a fail, and a big one. I made it to just over half way to my word goal of 50,000 words. I do not consider it an epic fail, I did learn a few things and I have the beginning of what I think will be my best novel to date.

Things I learned

1. I cannot write with the stomach flu

2. I can write with the regular flu, but I am very slow

3. I have lost a bit of my motivation that I had when I started writing

The first two point are pretty self explanatory. I did spend most of November(2 weeks) sick. I also had some fairly busy weekends and a lot to do at work.

But that brings me to my third point. I am just not as motivated as I was when I started writing. The other stuff wouldn’t have mattered last year or the year before. I would have just gotten Nano done. Don’t get me wrong there were some flashes of it. I had three different writing sessions where I wrote 5000+ words in a couple of hours. Of course that means that the other 27 days I got about 10,000 words written, about 400 words a day or so.

So as I sit and reflect on what has changed a few things come to mind. For one instead of organically letting the story come, I am planning out a plot and this novel is much better for it. There are no instances of characters appearing for a chapter and then disappearing. The plot is fairly consistent and I didn’t decided to add a couple of dragons on page 70 to spice it up. In short I am writing a better quality story.

The other problem is a little harder to express. I really want to write a great novel, one that will have wide spread appeal. While writing my first few novels I was positive they were good enough to be published the whole time I was writing them, and only saw the flaws when I went back through to edit. This time I see all the flaws in my novel right after I am done writing. But I know if I go back and fix them now that I will never finish.

This novel  is better than any of my other novels, I am sure of that, but right now I don’t think that is good enough to be published and that is making it hard to motivate myself to write it.

Of course I did get 25,000 words done in a month which really is a step up from the pace I was going at, so maybe I can keep it up and put out a couple of novels a year.